Alexander Onysko Eva-Maria Graf Werner Delanoy Guenther Sigott Nikola Dobri� (eds.) The Polyphony of English Studies A Festschrift for Allan James Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik The Polyphony of English Studies Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Herausgegeben von Alwin Fill, Walter Grünzweig, Walter Hölbling, Allan James, Bernhard Kettemann, Andreas Mahler, Christian Mair, Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf, Werner Wolf Band 26 Alexander Onysko, Eva-Maria Graf, Werner Delanoy, Guenther Sigott, Nikola Dobri� (eds.) The Polyphony of English Studies A Festschrift for Allan James Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. © 2017 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Internet: www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISSN 0939-8481 ISBN 978-3-8233-9140-1 Published with financial support of the Faculty of Humanities at Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt Table of contents Werner Delanoy, Alexander Onysko, Eva-Maria Graf, Guenther Sigott, and Nikola Dobrić Introduction.............................................................................................................. 7 Miriam H. Auer and Jörg Helbig Morpheme-stories to tell in the dark: A different THANK YOU..................... 11 Carmen M. Amerstorfer Keep up the good work ........................................................................................ 15 Alexander Onysko Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes .............................. 23 Stefano Quaino Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English ........................................ 35 Smiljana Komar The relationship between musical training and the acquisition of intonation in foreign learners of English ................................... 47 Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott Charting EFL writing development by means of the Scope - Substance error taxonomy. A pilot study........................................ 71 Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić The cognitive translation hypothesis and translating proverbs - a case study of English and Serbian............................. 85 Dušan Gabrovšek Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore.................................. 95 Table of contents 6 Eva-Maria Graf Forms and functions of metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction: The case of executive coaching......................................... 111 Gregor Chudoba Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen und seine Bedeutung für den Ausspracheunterricht mit türkischsprachigen Deutschlernenden ...................................................... 131 Ursula Doleschal Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority.................................................................................... 145 Werner Delanoy Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning .................................................................... 163 Bernhard Kettemann Orientalism/ Occidentalism ............................................................................... 177 Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin: An essay in appreciation of ‘Conlangs’ and the Land of the Red Dragon ....................................................................... 197 Margret Holt “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon or Welsh identity “made simple”? .................... 221 Heinz Tschachler “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations”: Racial and ethnic stereotyping in the writings of Washington Irving ..................... 241 Nursen Gömceli Language and physicality in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996): A postdramatic analysis ..................................................................................... 261 Contributors ......................................................................................................... 277 Werner Delanoy, Alexander Onysko, Eva-Maria Graf, Guenther Sigott, and Nikola Dobrić 1 Introduction Werner Delanoy et al. The present volume is intended as a tribute in honour of a scholar who is in many respects exceptional. Allan James, Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt, is a selfless and inspiring academic who has stimulated the thinking of countless students and large numbers of his colleagues. Quick-witted and with an incommensurable sense of irony, he combines a keen eye for linguistic detail with a clear vision of the grand picture. His breadth of knowledge easily reaches across the whole domain of linguistics and stretches beyond. In his work he has created new connections and continues to build bridges that promote an open and pluralistic view of English Studies. In line with Allan’s outreach, the title of this volume is not only in tune with his persona but also sums up the main intentions informing its contents. The focus on polyphony implies an approach privileging diversity, complexity and integration over monolithic and divisive concepts. Applied to English Studies, the field becomes a polyvocal, constantly developing and colourful conglomerate. As this collection of articles is conceived as a Festschrift for Allan James, the contributions reflect the range of his approaches, which have straddled disciplinary divisions in the interest of a dynamic and polyphonic understanding of Anglophone languages and cultures. The concept of polyphony as suggested by Allan can best be characterized as a discourse of freedom rooted in dialogic, transdisciplinary and cosmopolitan thinking. The concept of freedom reflected in his work resonates with Mikhael Bakhtin’s notion of the novel. For Bakhtin (1987: 39), the novel aims for “liberation from all that serves as a brake on [a genre’s] unique development”. In his scholarly work Allan is less concerned with literary genres, yet his understanding of language is founded on similar principles. Indeed, such novelization is a central characteristic of his work, best exemplified by his discussion of Lingua Franca English (ELF). For Allan, ELF is an unstable, protean, and context-dependent phenomenon of potentially infinite possibilities, which cannot and must not be fixed in essentialist terms. Indeed, like Bakhtin, Allan views language use as an open-ended and socio-culturally situated process. Such a notion moves 1 We would like to thank Rachel Köberl for her suggestions. Werner Delanoy et al. 8 beyond disciplinary boundaries within English Studies. It requires a conceptualization of language as language-in-culture, interlinking linguistics with culture studies, and also with literature, as can be seen in Allan’s close cooperation with Nursen Gömceli (2015). Following Claire Kramsch (1993: 233), such a dynamic view involves a continuous search for third places, i.e. for new transdisciplinary constellations to engage with still uncharted spaces. Such constellations are dialogic in principle. In line with a notion of dialogue that traverses approaches such as hermeneutics, cosmopolitanism, critical discourse analysis and post-colonial criticism, such third places result from respectful and power-critical encounters between equal partners (cf. Delanoy 2007). In these encounters difference is welcome because it can challenge existing positions and stimulate the joint creation of new knowledge. As his work on global Englishes shows, Allan’s linguistics is transnational in orientation. However, unlike Kachru’s (1986) Three Circle Model of world Englishes, his is a global perspective which no longer insists on pre-defined core and peripheral varieties. Instead, such as distinction is discussed as perspective-bound and as open to re-negotiation plus transformation. Indeed, Allan’s concept of global English is compatible with a cosmopolitan imagination of a kind suggested by Gerard Delanty (2009: 52-53), where “new relations between Self, Other and World develop in moments of openness” and through (self-) critical engagement with other positions. Moreover, this perspective is in tune with a rooted cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006) in which contextually situated subjects argue from culture-bound positions, yet aim for an enlarged mentality through contact and confrontation with other viewpoints. Indeed, Allan feels strongly connected to his Welsh roots, which have been enriched by a life of far-reaching intellectual and geographical travel. Ultimately, Allan’s global thinking links back to Bakhtin’s understanding of heteroglossia, that is to say, it “… is the expression of a Galilean perception of language” that can help de-centre monolithic notions and open the field of vision to widerranging and more inclusive concepts (cf. Bakhtin 1987: 366). This volume marks an attempt to bring together and interweave Allan’s scholarly concerns. In terms of English Studies, the book includes linguistic, cultural, and literary perspectives, each of them going beyond the tried and tested to explore new possibilities for each field under investigation. Indeed, disciplinary boundaries are often crossed in order to interlink linguistic with cultural and literary approaches. In some instances the bridges built reach out to disciplines outside English Studies, such as music and psychology. Moreover, languages other than English are included to draw attention to multilingual perspectives. A polyphony is thus created which engages and interlinks different disciplines, fields, and languages. In addition, some of the articles in this volume address Allan’s Welsh roots, which in their Introduction 9 combination of multilingual, literary, and cultural perspectives are themselves a rich basis for polyphonic thinking. Finally, the volume also includes non-academic compositions adding a more personal dimension. In line with a contrapuntal approach (cf. Kraidy 2005: 13), the different contributions interact with each other to highlight important themes in Allan’s work without privileging one field, discipline, or discourse over others. Thus, the contributors can make their individual voices heard and yet remain in concert with each other. References Appiah, Kwame A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin Books. Bakhtin, Mikhael M. 1987. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Delanoy, Werner. 2007. A dialogic model for literature teaching. In Werner Delanoy, Allan James & Jörg Helbig (eds.), Towards a Dialogic Anglistics, 275-292. Wien & Berlin: LIT. Delanty, Gerard. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gömceli, Nursen & Allan James. 2015. Hiberno-English and beyond in J.M. Synge’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World’: a literary linguistic analysis of its dramatic significance. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40 (2): 105-125. Kachru, Braj B. 1986. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Nonnative Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon. Kraidy, Marwan M. 2005. Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kramsch, Claire. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jörg Helbig and Miriam H. Auer Morpheme-stories to tell in the dark: A different THANK YOU Part One: The Morpheme Wars (Jörg Helbig) Professor: “Have you seen the bearded man catching morphemes in a can? ” Student: “Yes, I've seen that creepy guy. How’s he doing it, and why? ” Professor: “Well, you know, he hates morphemes! So, he listens to their screams. Then he takes them to his home where he breaks their allophone, tortures them with glottal stops, makes them eating language slops...” Student: “Tell me more, Professor, more! Spooky stories I adore! ” Professor: “Oh, you unsuspecting fool you must learn the golden rule: Let me try to get this straight: Horrid deeds like these create linguistic anarchy and destroy the galaxy! ” Student: “Isn't there a remedy? ” Professor: “Yes, of course there is, my dear. We must find a volunteer who is brave enough and strong to defeat the Great Diphtong in the Land of Prosody.” Student: “This will lead to tragedy! ” Professor: “But not necessarily. Our hero needs an aid.” Student: “Wait a minute, Master, wait! Could this be a girl like me? I've got muscles, don't you see? And with my phonetic spell Jörg Helbig and Miriam H. Auer 12 I can give the Diphtong hell! ” Professor: “Oh you foolish girl, keep still! You will need a special skill: Are you able to perform voiceless in sonata form? ” Student: “No, Professor, but I own a labio-dental homophone.” Professor: “Fine, my lovely, that's a start. Now it's time to play your part. Meet the hero, join his fight on the deconstruction site! Kill the Diphtong and you'll see you can set the morphemes free. That will end the Morpheme Wars and the hero will be yours. After all this ballyhoo maybe he will marry you.” Student: “I don't want to coexist with a deconstructionist! There's but one wish on my list: Let me be your linguist! ” Part Two: The Peaceful Avocado-(R )Evolution (Miriam H. Auer) Yes, a travelling man knows stories to tell with grains of truth - the words’ morphemes - to spell out loud smilingly into the face of resignation, knowledge may save you from alienation. If you find a lost morpheme on the street take it with you and plant it in a garden, next to red beet, soon to behold the wordy wonders evolving at your feet, as some words of wisdom will have grown, the morphemes’ truth can thus be shown. However, it can also be eaten fresh from the bed, ‘cause with words a sentence needs to be fed. We enjoyed the meals served by a unique aficionado who shared his passion with the, initially, clueless student-avocado. A morpheme-harvester cherishing the language-fruits of the world, demonstrating the multitude of world Englishes unfurled, Morpheme-stories to tell in the dark: A different THANK YOU 13 will definitely never ever cease to be an enthusiastic linguist, knowing how to free our heads from each language boundary. Remember, remember: the flame, not only the ember, that lit, in us, the spark of wanting to know more about multilingualism’s interdisciplinary galore. In addition, for a glass that’ll always be at least half-full, please never ever forget each and every language-tool a special someone provided us with to help ourselves when words are amiss, to freshly harvest and then mix right from your bed: the smoothie his friendly, learned words create, blended with a sense of humour known to elevate even the most desperate student-soul, making us want to dance around the language-pole - fully dressed, though, to make this clear - morphemes and lexemes follow seasons through the year. A man like him never loses his way through the longest of words, perfectly knowing where lexicology itches and connotation hurts. Vocalise the Dark L well, help intonation up that fell! Vanuatu, India and Surinam, let world Englishes out of the can! Study pidgins, creoles and their respective history which helps us to understand that no one superior should be, yet be well-aware that language always finds its way, like nature, through the man-made borders of today. Help words to freely grow in the most hostile soil, use a lingua franca to state that language must not be used as a coil. As for the spooky stories we adore, discern one grain of truth, or maybe more: Find everyone who hates morphemes, maybe none of them is who s/ he seems. Probably they are just at a loss of words And try to breed new ones, to hatch them like birds. Let us provide them with the lexicon, a thesaurus, yes, the one with synonyms in, before they feel like all language were gone. Had JURASSIC PARK bred a Thesaurus for people to see it would have been a beautifully tranquil library. Jörg Helbig and Miriam H. Auer 14 Let us thank him for turning most of us student-avocados from sometimes rather lost linguistics-desperados into a considerably great guacamole. We need not be omniscient, will not be holy, but always metaphorically ripe and open to learning something new, to empathetically know the worth of each word, each person, each “you”. Alas, to conclude this special way to tell an episode of Morpheme-Stories well we simply want to say now, without further ado, dearest friend and teacher Allan James, THANK YOU! Linguists United: “Have you all seen this bearded man making us learn and laugh whenever he can? ” Students and colleagues: “Yes, we've seen this awesome guy. Great how he’s doing it, and why! " ~ Carmen M. Amerstorfer Keep up the good work I recently met with a group of seven students in a coffee shop on campus to talk about their Diploma theses. They study in the AAU’s teacher education programme at the Department of English and selected me as the supervisor of their final papers. The informal meeting was set up similar to a research forum. Each participant presented the proposed topic of her thesis, a number of research questions, and hypotheses. We discussed the quality of their proposals and drafted individual plans of action. All seven were keen to conduct small, empirical research projects but did not know how to handle methodological issues and were unaware of other important aspects. My basic roles were to give feedback, provide guidance, recommend literature, clarify official regulations, and answer general questions. And most importantly, I was there to give those young women the confidence to put their ideas into practice. All seven students were motivated to research authentic EFL learners in real Austrian schools as opposed to reading about their abstractions in books and journals. Some of the students had already developed proposals of high quality with clear objectives and feasible timelines. Others needed a bit of a reality check, for instance, when their plans were much too ambitious for the framework conditions. Some had already read about how to conduct educational research, while others were complete beginners. Regardless of the current status of their projects, all seven students had one thing in common: they suffered from insecurities. Their major concerns were their foreign language abilities and their qualities as researchers and academic writers. One reason for their self-doubts may be that none of them had conducted an empirical research project before; another that their first language is not English. They were about to make a whole new experience, which can understandably be quite scary. I remember all too well what it felt like to go through that process. As a foreign language learner I have encountered numerous situations in which I doubted my abilities. In academia, low self-esteem can lead to an increased stress level, which may have drastic consequences. In very severe cases, a spiral of negativity may even drag a student down until they lose their ambition and motivation for academic work in the foreign language altogether. For me it was never that extreme, but I will not deny my insecurities and moments of doubt. By now you may have started wondering why you are reading all of this. What does that have to do with Carmen M. Amerstorfer 16 Professor James? Professor Allan James has pushed my confidence as an academic writer and researcher. He selflessly volunteered to preview my articles and provided constructive and supportive feedback. He gave me confidence and helped me through my personal struggles. With my contribution to this Festschrift I would like to thank Professor James. But let me start at the beginning. My passion for English developed when nobody in my class was brave enough to talk to Heidi, a 16-year-old Australian exchange student. I had learned English as a foreign language for six years by then. Talking to Heidi was scary and exciting at the same time. She came from the opposite side of the planet, where the water in the toilet supposedly swirls the other way round. She came from a “landa landa 1 ,” where kangaroos and koalas live, where children play with boomerangs and their fathers play the didgeridoo. Heidi was exotic and my head was full of stereotypes that were soon replaced by actual facts that Heidi told me about growing up and living in Australia. When she told me how she always checked her shoes for deadly spiders before putting them on, I thought Heidi’s life was very different from mine. Heidi did not know any German. I knew, if I wanted to be her friend, I had to speak English. My motivation to get better at English was authentic and acute because Heidi was only going to stay for a few months. Perhaps the social intelligence we both learned as children growing up in big families helped us bridge our communication gaps. I made an effort to get over my anxieties about speaking in English. At the same time Heidi listened patiently and supported me by guessing, rephrasing, and using gestures. After her return to Australia, Heidi and I wrote letters to each other and later changed to email. I still have the letters she wrote to me, which helped me realise that English speakers make mistakes in their own language, too. What a relief! I already knew at the age of seven or eight that I wanted to become a teacher. I made my younger siblings sit and listen to me while I wrote letters on a black board in the living room and lectured them about how to move their hands to write those letters. I am glad that my teaching style changed when I learned about different methodologies at teacher education college. My English teachers at the college, an Englishman and an Austrian who was more English than the teacher from the UK, noticed my passion for English. They always took the time to answer questions about English grammar or song lyrics I did not quite understand. However, some of their answers triggered further questions or caused confusion. For instance, if ‘used to’ 1 Men at work actually sing “land down under” in the song about Australia. As a kid I didn’t understand and always sang “landa landa” when the song was playing on the radio. Keep up the good work 17 expresses “that something happened continuously or frequently during a period in the past” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary 2 ), how can a person sing about somebody that they used to know? When and how did they stop knowing the person? My teachers helped me understand what The Corrs and Tracey Chapman were singing about, what Curt Cobain meant when he invited me to come as I was, 3 and whether Californication 4 was an actual word. At the end of the undergraduate teacher education, I got the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus study abroad programme that had been newly introduced at the college. I spent a year in Edinburgh and attended courses at Moray House in pursuit of a Master’s degree in Education with a specific focus on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). I remember the day of my arrival in Scotland as if it was yesterday. I got on a bus at Glasgow airport that was supposed to take me to the train station to continue on to Edinburgh, my final destination. I had bought my tickets in advance and had them all in my hand luggage ready to produce them on demand. It took me a while to lift my two heavy suitcases onto the bus at the airport. I remember how exhausted I was and how much I looked forward to sitting down and relaxing on the bus. As soon as I had found a seat, the bus driver started shouting at me in a language I’d never heard before. I quickly figured that he must be a real Scotsman and that this is his natural way to talk. How frustrating! I studied English for so many years, and now I was unable to understand a word. I went up to the front of the bus and asked the driver politely if he could please slow down because I had trouble understanding what he said. He looked at me confused because apparently my English was good enough to express myself well. He shaped a small rectangle in the air with his thumbs and forefingers and said just one word, “ti-cket.” I was relieved that I had not really done anything wrong. I showed him the ticket and sat quietly and intimidated in my seat until Glasgow train station. During my stay in Edinburgh I managed to understand the local people better, except the cleaning ladies at the student halls of residence who appeared to be speaking in a coded secret language and called each other “hen.” I did not adopt a Scottish accent although my a-sounds became a bit flatter, and I sometimes rolled an r for fun when chatting with my American friend, who still calls me “hen” today. Interestingly, Edinburgh is the place 2 Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. 2016. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 13, 2016. http: / / www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ definition/ english/ used-to? q= used+to 3 “Come as you are” is a song by the American rock band Nirvana. It was written by the band’s lead singer Curt Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994. 4 “Californication” is the title of a song and album by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers released in 1999. Carmen M. Amerstorfer 18 where I learned to speak German with a German accent because the exchange students from Germany did not understand my Austrian dialect. While I was still working on my Master thesis, the University of Maastricht hired me as an intern for their talencentrum 5 . What was supposed to be a three-months internship turned into a full-time position as EFL (English as a Foreign Language), EAP (English for Academic Purposes), and ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teacher. Some of those purposes were truly specific and quite special, too, for example, teaching English to students at a vroedvrouwenschool 6 . The two main purposes were to learn how to explain biological and physiological body functions related to pregnancy and how to speak to women in pain who are having a baby in a country whose language they do not master. For me as a native speaker of German, with a good command of English and Matura in French, understanding Dutch was fairly easy. I could follow conversations quite soon unless they were in Mestreechter Taol 7 . Of course there were words that caused confusion, for instance “Bommelding,” which I came across in written form in a training course for Bedrijvshulpverlener 8 . It took me a few minutes to put the stress mark in the correct place for the word to make sense in context. My initial thought was “What kind of thing? ” until I realised that it is Bom-melding 9 and not Bommel-ding. My Dutch flatmate, who was a native dialect speaker, was a great support when learning to speak Dutch without any formal instruction. He always answered my questions, explained grammatical issues, and corrected my pronunciation. I remember how difficult I found pronouncing the letter combination ui as in huis 10 or uien. 11 My flatmate was also the one who boosted my confidence to get over myself and speak Dutch in public situations. The first time I did was a classical shopping situation. I built up my confidence and constructed the sentence in my mind before I asked the lady in the store for a particular item I could not find on the shelves. My strategies were successful; however, I was embarrassed when the lady shouted to her colleague across the store what I was looking for. As opposed to my true friends in human form, false friends in different languages played tricks on me. How was I to know, for instance, that the Dutch word slim, which sounds like the English antonym of fat and the German word for naughty (schlimm), means smart or clever? Other cognates were, for example, the Dutch question words wie (which means who, unlike 5 language centre 6 school for midwives (I believe the gender-neutral term is delivery nurse.) 7 dialect name for the dialect spoken in Maastricht 8 emergency response people 9 bomb alarm 10 house 11 onions Keep up the good work 19 its German optical twin) and hoe (which sounds like who but means how). Oh, and the verbs got my head spinning. “Dat mag niet.” , “Dat kan niet.” , “Dat hoeft niet.”, “Dat durf je niet.” - They all mean something different than I would have guessed 12 . Other important phrases to know when living in a Dutch-speaking country turned out to be met de fiets because it is not a cliché that nearly everything is done by bicycle in the Netherlands, and t/ m, which is short for tot en met and signifies the quantities of two measures including the last measure. I must admit that I challenged my brains when I took evening classes just across the border in Belgium to freshen up my French with a Flemish-speaking instructor and a Français-Nederlands dictionary. My time in the Netherlands was followed by some travelling to exotic places like Jordan, where I attended a Scottish-American wedding, and Australia, where I visited Heidi and her family. Then I moved to China, and all of a sudden I was one year older because Chinese babies are already one year old when they are born. I observed some interesting scenes in Shanghai, for instance, groups of retired people doing Qigong on the busy squares of the city centre, people walking backwards (sometimes with their eyes closed) to reflect on the days, and others hugging trees to regain energy. These positive approaches to improving life were in contrast to the fears the Chinese (I apologise for the generalisation) impose on themselves through their superstitions. For example, the number 4 ( 四 ; sì) is by all means to be avoided because it sounds almost identical to the Chinese word for dead ( 死 ; sǐ). Another number that supposedly means bad luck is 13, so many Chinese buildings do not have a fourth and thirteenth floor. Similarly, you would not be able to book a seat in row four or thirteen on a flight operated by a Chinese airline. The most popular seats are in row eight ( 八 ; bā), because eight sounds similar to the Chinese word for wealth or fortune ( 发 ; fā). When I moved back to Austria, I experienced a real culture shock. After two and a half years in a city that never sleeps, I found myself in a small village in a Carinthian valley that was quite the opposite of what I had become accustomed to in Shanghai. All of a sudden the nights were dark and silent, the air was fresh and clean, and my neighbours were curious and chatty. People looked at me strangely when I stood too close to them in the line at the supermarket checkout, when I made slurping noises while eating, and when I used hand gestures they did not understand. Soon I noticed linguistic differences to the region in Upper Austria where I grew up. I had no idea what it meant that the cat was stirzln 13 or what Strankalen 14 are. I was 12 Dat mag niet. = It’s not allowed.; Dat kan niet. = It’s not possible.; Dat hoeft niet. = It’s not necessary.; Dat durf je niet. = You wouldn’t dare. 13 streunen; to stray 14 Fisolen; green beans Carmen M. Amerstorfer 20 also surprised to realise that Carinthians often neglect the dative case despite Bastian Sick’s observation that “Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod 15 .” Thank goodness that the main language spoken at my new work place was English. As opposed to previous work environments, at Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt I did not have to overcome any language or cultural barriers worth mentioning. Instead, I faced a different challenge in the form of a PhD thesis. Similar to the first time I spoke English to a native speaker, entering this unknown territory was both exciting and scary. From previous encounters with PhD students I thought that there must be some kind of (psychological, biological, neurological? ) predisposition for doing research and writing about it because they all appeared relaxed and comfortable. Perhaps they were born with the confidence that is required for academic writing in a foreign language. I, on the other hand, was insecure. In theory, doing a PhD was quite straightforward: Define a topic that inspires you and that will interest you for an extended period of time; read a lot (about your chosen topic and related topics, about research methodology in your field, about academic writing style); make a plan of action including a time line; apply what you learned from the literature about research design and methods; pay attention to ethical and political correctness; collect data; analyse data; and finally, write it all up. That’s it. Well, at least that was what an imaginary optimist whispered in my ear. In my other ear, however, there was a sceptic’s voice asking a lot of questions: How can I narrow the focus of my study? How can I get everything done within the available time besides my other obligations? Am I a good enough academic writer? How can I integrate my own opinion in academic writing? Will anybody be interested in my opinion? Is my English good enough? Can I express myself clearly and correctly? Am I describing the context of my research in a way an international audience can follow? I was confused and uncertain of my academic skills … and lucky to have worked at the Department of English at AAU. I realised that I was part of a very strong and supportive network of colleagues. I had a supervisor who provided the guidance that was necessary to get me started and whose pep talks always came at the right time. There were other early-career researchers who were available for philosophical and methodological discussions. And there were experienced scholars who offered their support in a number of ways. Professor Allan James was one of them. Allan and I had chatted in the corridor on a number of occasions before, but one day he asked me how my PhD thesis was coming along. I told him about my research project and that I had started writing an article for an edited volume. He said that if I would like some 15 KiWi-Taschenbuch, 2004 Keep up the good work 21 feedback on my written work, I may send the article to him. I felt honoured that Professor James would take the time to read my work. It took quite some courage to send him my paper because of all the self-doubt the sceptical voice in my ear was causing. I am glad I got over myself and sent Allan the file because the feedback I received was constructive and encouraging. Amongst similar experiences with other senior scholars, Professor James’ advice to “keep up the good work” motivated me to become the best academic writer I can be. Some time has passed since then. I am now in a position where I can spread some confidence amongst students who are about to finish their studies at the Department of English. The seven teacher education students whose diploma theses I currently supervise wanted to know why I met with them in my free time. They appreciated my support very much but found it unusual that I would sacrifice my leisure time for the sake of their theses. The answer is quite simple: I am trying to reciprocate by passing on how Professor James supported me as a PhD student. He read my articles although my research interests were not identical to his. He generously offered his guidance and feedback on my work even though I did not participate in any of his courses. He pushed my confidence with encouraging comments but did not get anything in return. He devoted his time to support my academic progress, and now I am paying it forward to my students. Professor James is retired now and I am grateful that I can contribute my story to this Festschrift. It gives me the opportunity to publicly emphasise two of Allan’s traits that made working with him a great pleasure: first, Allan’s welcoming and open-minded attitude towards the people he meets; and second, the respectful manner in which Allan treats students and colleagues regardless of their knowledge, skills, education, experience, and background. Allan James has a gift to make the people around him feel valued and special. His altruistically shared wisdom and kindness have been highly appreciated by students and staff at the Department of English. Thank you, Professor James. Alexander Onysko Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes A philological understanding of language is one which seeks to incorporate linguistic, literary and cultural dimensions of its significance as communication and which takes methodological pluralism as a matter of course. Second Language (SL) Englishes can equally be analysed in this light. They constitute Englishes in ontogeny and use, much like First Language Englishes, but are socially positioned firmly in the transcultural sphere. As such, linguistically their habitat is a multilingual space (James 2003). Of course both their ontogeny and use continue to be open to linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic interpretation in which, however, the particularity/ universality of SL Englishes within the domain of Englishes will be foregrounded (fruitful points of reference could be to the phylogeny and use of other Englishes worldwide). But ontogeny and use are equally amenable to sociocultural and literary analysis (in the sense, e.g., of postcolonial theory). However, philological approaches facilitate integrated perspectives and as such these are worthy of exploration. (James 2007: 113- 114) 1. Introduction I have chosen this excerpt from Allan James’s numerous writings as it encapsulates his broad vision of the complex constellation that emerges from the plethora of Englishes employed in different functions and uses around the world. His thinking about the diversity of Englishes is at once holistic, pluralistic (Englishes), dynamic (characterized by contact in multilingual spaces), as well as trans-, interand multidisciplinary. This ample view of language provides a fertile ground for a usage-based analysis of English codes, conceptualizing language use as social-semiotic instances of discursive interaction. Before exploring this view of language further in the way that Allan has outlined it to promote the understanding of the functions of Englishes in the world, the notion of Second Language (SL) Englishes calls for a brief reflection. In fact, the centrality of SL Englishes in the quotation above is representative of Allan’s background as a linguist - his “upbringing” and training back in the early 1970s as a phonologist with a particular predilection for learner accents. While he was engaged in research of English Alexander Onysko 24 second language phonology at the University of Amsterdam, his work in this area created a link to the chair of English linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt, the late Professor Bill Nemser. Still today, Allan, in his inimitable tongue-in-cheek manner, likes to recount the impressions of his first time visit at the University of Klagenfurt back in the 1980s, just arrived from Amsterdam. His words reveal the passion for the place and shed light on how a dear relationship started to grow to the place and its people. Therefore, it was a fortunate event in many senses when Allan was called to succeed Bill Nemser as chair in English linguistics at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt. When commencing his work there, the phonetics and phonology of second language acquisition (SLA) remained an important concern for Allan, and he engaged in applying his knowledge also in educational contexts outside of the university. At the same time, Allan’s academic work at the University of Klagenfurt saw an expansion towards analyzing the international role of English from a postmodern, poststructuralist point of view. His approach tuned in to a line of thinking which started to crystalize in the domain of critical sociolinguistics and, as such, Allan’s work offers some answers to the call of changing our monolithic conception of language brought forward among critical sociolinguists (cf. Blommaert 2010, 2012; Pennycook 2001, 2007). The development of Allan’s thinking towards a postmodern and poststructural socio-semiotic model of Lingua Franca English(es) is remarkable since, as a second language phonologist by training, he stayed afloat of the mainstream Chomskyan view that dominated the understanding of language at that time. Allan’s work shows his critical reflection on the monolithic view of languages that prevailed in the field of second language acquisition up until the 1990s: By and large, the ‘acquisition’ of a nonprimary language has been seen to involve the successive internalization of the linguistic structure and rules of the ‘target’ system tout court, the ultimate arbitrator of which is the (judgement of the) nominal ‘native speaker’ of the latter, whose competence is being aimed for. The historical roots for this anchoring of second language acquisition (and foreign language teaching) within - monolithic - linguistic analysis/ description of course ultimately reach as far back as the 19th century, and, similarly, older forms of native speaker-like prescription equally stretch back far in the history of [the] ‘applied linguistic’ endeavour. However, the development of the contrastive analysis programmes of the US Center for Applied Linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s and related projects consolidated this conception of language acquisition in modem times. And while the actual learning process was reconceived in ‘cognitive’ as opposed to the discredited ‘behaviourist’ terms as the 1970s progressed, and Contrastive Analysis transmuted into Error Analysis and ultimately into Interlanguage study, the basic assumption that what was being acquired was that which a linguistic description of (the standard form of the) Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes 25 target language provided remained largely unchallenged until the 1990s. (James 2007: 107) In the same article on second language acquisition and second language use, Allan continues by alluding to the emerging alternative conception of second language acquisition and second language use as it applies to the international role of English as a Lingua Franca: […] the study of SL Englishes in multilingual and transcultural contexts has in recent years highlighted the position of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), i.e. pristinely ‘the anglophone varieties which emerge between/ among language users whose own primary linguistic socialization has been via (an)other language(s) and who do not (wish to) share any other language for use’ (James 2006). Such SL Englishes offer serious challenges to both linguistic and applied linguistic orthodoxies as recent studies have pointed out (James 2000, 2005; Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2001). G. Cook (2005), for instance, states of the impact of studies of English as an international language and lingua franca that “they could lead to fundamentally new conceptions of the object of linguistic enquiry: language, languages and speakers” (2005, 292). However, within an Anglistics framework, linguistic interpretation can be enriched by sociocultural insights to the extent that new ‘hybrid’ theories of (second) languages can emerge. (James 2007: 114) This quotation hints at the fact that Allan’s work since the turn of the millennium has substantially contributed to academic discourse on the notion of English as a Lingua Franca. Beyond that, he developed an interactional sociolinguistic theory of Englishes that stands as a comprehensive and holistic model of the functions and uses of Englishes on a global scale. The next section will trace these intertwined developments palpable in his publications. 2. Theorizing Englishes The title of this section is inspired by Allan’s (2009) article Theorising English and globalisation: semiodiversity and linguistic structure in Global English, World Englishes and Lingua Franca English, which, to my mind, is central to the description of his interconnected view of Lingua Franca English (not English as a Lingua Franca! ) and the plurality of uses and functions of Englishes in the world. Even though the notion of Lingua Franca English is inherently tied to his interactional, functional, and sociolinguistic model of Englishes, the following discussion will assume a two-tiered approach to highlight the importance of his thinking on the strand of English as a Lingua Franca (as a nuclefied domain of research) and theory construction in world Englishes at large. Alexander Onysko 26 2.1 English as a Lingua Franca as a chimera - Lingua Franca English as a reality Readers of Allan’s work will easily discern the creative “borrowing” in the title, taken from his 2006a article Lingua Franca English as chimera: sociocultural and sociolinguistic perspectives. The twist here is that while English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has developed as a separate field of investigation (cf., e.g., Seidlhofer 2011), Allan seems to employ the label of Lingua Franca English (LFE) to emphasize an understanding that is different from the tendency present within the ELF paradigm to essentialize ELF as a codifiable variety. Thus, already at the time when academic interest in ELF only started to arise, Allan described ELF (still using that designation) not as a dialect characterized by a set of features but as a register that is “determined by the nature of the social activity” and “is characterised as that which the user is speaking at the time (not habitually)” (James 2000: 33). His application of the Hallidayan distinction between registers and dialects together with the later addition of the notion of genre constitute the core of Allan’s theoretical approach to Lingua Franca English and world Englishes (see Section 2.2). Following his critical stance and alternative conceptualization of Lingua Franca English as a performance code that is tied to the factors of language proficiency and communicative needs of different L1 users of English, I would like to quote from two of his articles in which he clearly argues against the futile attempt of trying to codify the performative function of Lingua Franca English. Comparing Lingua Franca English with a chimera, Allan states that [t]he problem would again seem to still largely revolve around the essentialist issue of whether or not there is a discernible variety which may be called lf [lingua franca] English which is associated with a particular speech community and is codifiable. And while there has been certain recognition that the chimera might be more convincingly interpreted as inhabiting Wenger's (1998) movable communities of practice (House 2003) rather than any conventional speech community, attempts at codification as the variety of a speech community are seemingly relentless. (James 2006a: 224) [emphasis in the original] Two years later, in his article entitled The challenges of the Lingua Franca: English in the world and types of variety, he elucidates the point that ELF cannot be considered a variety of English since it is neither confined to a specific speech community, nor to a territory, and it cannot be characterized according to structural linguistic features. Returning to the structural and functional nature of the present ELF, it is emphatically not a coded ‘lect’ in the sense that territorially local Englishes are coded ‘lects’. ELF in general is an aterritorial, contextual, essentially ‘one off’ realization of the language for immediate communication purposes. It is a temporary, potentially variable and/ or unstable linguistic phenomenon, and in Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes 27 contrast to territorialized Englishes it is devoid of any conventional speech community identity value. (James 2008: 136-137) [emphasis in the original] While Allan is one of the early scholars to comment on the Sisyphean task of ascribing variety status to English as a Lingua Franca, his voice is not the only one that convincingly argues against essentializing ELF as a variety (e.g. Gupta 2001; Mollin 2006). Park and Wee, for example, follow a similar line of reasoning when concluding that ELF is not a variety but an activity type “where the goal of interaction involves the need to communicate in a situation where the participants do not share the same first language” (2011: 360). Similarly, a critical stance against considering ELF as a codifiable variety of English is at the backdrop of discourse by scholars who see global uses of English as emergent practices (e.g. Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2010). Taking a contact linguistic perspective on world Englishes (cf. Onysko 2016), Lingua Franca English can be defined as a performance code that is employed in a situation where speakers communicate using partially shared means of communication which are variably influenced by their knowledge and communicative habits in English and other language(s). Among these consensual opinions, however, Allan’s work is particularly outstanding as he comprehensively theorizes the reality of Lingua Franca English in our postmodern, globalized, and virtually connected world from a conclusive functional and socio-interactional point of view, setting it in relation to other types of Englishes. The next section will zoom in on his model. 2.2 The Three Codes Model of Englishes In several publications (James 2000, 2006b, 2008a, 2008b, 2009), Allan develops a theory that captures the essence of Lingua Franca English as a socio-culturally situated, interactional and functional code of communication. In its comprehensive design, the model also goes beyond that and outlines different macro-categories of diversity among the Englishspeaking world. It also bears general significance for understanding types of variety in language. Considering the wider academic discourse on global Englishes, Allan’s theory meets the call for creating a theoretical basis to understand the phenomenon of global Englishes and uses of English around the world from the perspectives of postmodern linguistics (e.g. Pennycook 2001), critical applied linguistics, and the sociolinguistics of globalization (cf. Blommaert 2010). Although Allan has not used a specific label for his model and he might actually find the one proposed here in the title as being too reductive or not appropriate, for the purpose of synthesizing, I would like to tentatively use the designation The Three Codes Model of Englishes since it reflects Allan’s tripartite view of Englishes. At the beginning of his critical dilucidation of Lingua Franca English (named English as a Lingua Franca then), he Alexander Onysko 28 followed Halliday (1978) in postulating a dichotomy of dialect and register (James 2000: 32-35). While dialect is defined as “a variety according to the user”, register refers to “a variety according to the use” (Halliday 1978: 35 qtd. in James 2000: 32-33). In other words, dialect is to be understood as the habitual way of speaking which is tied to a speaker’s identity whereas register relates to language use in a particular moment of time and situation, depending on the context of the speech act. Relying on this basic differentiation, Allan rightly concludes that “the kind of English as a lingua franca under discussion has the characteristics of a register, rather than a dialect (James 2000: 33; emphasis in the original). A few years later (James 2006b), Allan refines this vision and adds a third dimension that characterizes Lingua Franca English (referred to as ELF and EIL [English as an International Language]) even more appropriately - the notion of genre. Allan’s understanding of genre is based on Bakhtin’s definition who holds that “[a] speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical form of utterance. Genres correspond to typical situations of speech communication” (1981: 87, qtd. in James 2006b: 78). To this, Allan adds the interactional and transactional domains of genre drawing on McCarthy’s contexts of talk (1998), and he chimes in with Fairclough’s (2003) characterization of genre as ways of acting. Altogether, he combines these insights into a holistic multi-dimensional view of Lingua Franca English that consists of the three interrelated components of dialect, register, and genre. Figure 1 is a graphical reconstruction of Allan’s original figure (James 2006b: 81). -dialogism + (centripetal) --- DIALECT REGISTER GENRE --- (centrifugal) + heteroglossia -- Figure 1: The Three Codes Model of Englishes (James 2006b: 81) Figure 1 shows the three major code types, i.e. dialect (variety according to user), register (variety according to use), and genre (variety according to using) which can be conceptualized as underlying every speech event to varying extents (see James 2006b: 77). Furthermore, the model incorporates the Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia (using the words of others, i.e., conventionalized forms of expression in a speech community) and dialogism (language choice as addressee oriented) as well as the Bakhtinian metaphor of centripetal (homogenizing) and centrifugal (heterogenizing) forces, which govern the development of language (James 2006b: 81). Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes 29 As far as the position of Lingua Franca English (or ELF/ EIL) is concerned, Allan locates the use of English by speakers of different L1 backgrounds at the genre end of the continuum. He specifies that “the cutting-edge addressivity and diversification of EIL/ ELF is carried via its generic qualities, its ‘employing the words of others’ and its conformity via its dialectal qualities. Significant linguistic change over time in EIL/ ELF will most likely be genre-led and dialect-trailed” (James 2006b: 81). In two subsequent publications (James 2008a, 2008b), Allan discusses examples of Lingua Franca English and consolidates this tripartite view before his development of the model culminates in the article Theorising English and globalisation: semiodiversity and linguistic structure in Global English, World Englishes and Lingua Franca English. As the title announces, this article builds a bridge between main theories of globalization and macro-categories of Englishes by conclusively framing them in Allan’s Three Codes Model of Englishes. Table 1 provides a synthesis that highlights the emerging connections when projecting the Three Codes Model onto the social and linguistic effects of globalisation and the major types of Englishes in the world. The reader should be aware of the fact that Table 1 is merely representing the essence of these relations, each of which is much more comprehensively delineated in the original article. Table 1: The relationship between three code types of language, Englishes, and effects of globalization Code (variety): Dialect Register Genre Englishes: World Englishes Global English Lingua Franca English Globalisation as: Heterogenization Homogenization Hybridization The interrelation between dialect, world Englishes, and heterogenization is motivated by the fact that the Hallidayan definition of dialect as variety according to user is represented in a view of world Englishes as dialects that can “function as nationality markers, and convey the geographical [and we might add potentially ethnic] identity of the members of the speech communities they define” (James 2009: 87). As identity markers, it can be surmised that these Englishes largely follow heterogenizing tendencies in order to maintain boundaries (i.e. differences) to other speech communities. Global English bears the characteristics of a register since “[t]he language is one for ‘use’ within specific discourse communities - (sub-)cultures, business, [and] professional [contexts]” (James 2009: 87), which are particularly characterized by their domain-specific terminology. One prominent Alexander Onysko 30 example is the global use of English as part of hip hop culture (cf. Pennycook 2007). From a contact linguistic point of view, Global English(es) tend to leave their mark on other languages in the form of domain specific borrowings as in terms relating to IT, computer and communication technology, business, music, sports, and other areas. On the whole, this domain-specific global spread of Englishes brings about a homogenizing effect among different languages and cultures. English as a common means of communication (in a specific situation) among speakers of different language backgrounds (i.e. Lingua Franca English), emphasizes the situationally-bound ‘using’ aspect of language. As Allan states, “[g]enre captures the using of the language for actional purposes, for functional communication in the cause of interand transaction, i.e. for getting things done” (James 2009: 87). On the globalization pane, the situational use of English happens on the background of more or less strong influences from the speakers’ other language(s) and is driven by situational needs of communication. This leads to a tendency to hybridize or glocalize the English being used. In other words, speakers creatively mould the lexicogrammatical, semantic, and pragmatic shape of their situationally employed English. This aspect has become an important part of mainstream ELF research (cf. Pitzl, fthc.). After laying out the interrelations between macro-types of Englishes, types of codes, and effects of globalization (which, to remind the reader again, is more fully fleshed out in the 2009 article), Allan does not hesitate to stress the continual, and interconnected nature of the categories and their relations, in particular as they pertain to an understanding of Lingua Franca English. However, it must be stressed that any manifestation of English in an international function is likely to show evidence of all three varieties and sets of structural choices/ semiotic potential at one time (James 2005, 2008). It is just the case that each of the three structural-functional complexes tends to be fundamentally associated with each one of the globalising Englishes, respectively. (James 2009: 87) In sum, the discussion in this section has shown that Allan’s thinking has led to an invaluable contribution to the theoretical foundations in the fields of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca, the latter of which has striven to define itself as a separate research domain. His model (named the Three Codes Model in this article) provides a definite answer to the status of Lingua Franca English as a genre that emerges from using English in situated acts of communication involving speakers of different language backgrounds. Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes 31 3. The ultimate word […] has not yet been spoken 1 After developing a conclusive theory that models the role of Lingua Franca English in relation to other macro-types of Englishes in the world, Allan has turned his attention towards the use and functions of Global English in some recent publications. Holistically approaching instantiations of Global English, Allan intertwines the textual and visual domains discussing the interplay of textual, graphical, and pictorial aspects of English mixed with other languages in hybrid textual-graphical modes. In the article English as a visual language. Theorising the social semiotics of anglography in polylingual texts (James 2014), Allan builds a theoretical framework that elucidates the social semiotics of English (i.e. anglography). His framework incorporates research on the influence of English in print journalism, print advertising and linguistic landscapes. Furthermore, he discusses the semiotics of typography, orthography, and script while drawing on the works of Kress & van Leeuwen (2001) and Kress (2010) in order to reflect on the semiotic relations of the verbal and the visual in multimodal spaces. This is complemented by the three basic layers of language functions as postulated in Systemic Functional Grammar (e.g. Halliday & Matthiesen 2014), i.e. the ideational, interpersonal, and textual linguistic functions and by Fairclough’s (2003) use of the notion of identification. Combining these dimensions, Allan establishes a tripartite functional division into the anglographic identification of information, product, and person. This is connected to major structural (linguistic) means of realization, and it is also related to prototypical domains in which anglography occurs (official public signage, print advertising, private ecommunication). Allan then exemplifies his foundational theory by analyzing anglographic representations in the three prototypical domains, which shows how typography, verbal, and visual modes of communication interact for the purposes of a) the identification of information, b) the representation of products, and c) the expression of personal traits. In a more recent article (James 2016), Allan provides further evidence for the functions of anglography in multilingual contexts. His analysis focuses on the dynamic and multimodal interaction of Englishes with other languages, exemplifying its socio-semiotic value in the representation of products and personal identities. He discusses a range of examples from different text types and media including a print advertisement, tourist identification tags, a Thai-English Facebook posting and an online Welsh- English chat exchange. 1 I would like to thank Werner Delanoy for suggesting this title in reference to Bakhtin (1984: 165-166). Alexander Onysko 32 Even though this section has the purpose of striking a concluding note to the discussion of Allan’s groundbreaking advances in world Englishes theory (in particular Lingua Franca English), his most recent work on anglography as an instantiation of Global Englishes is not only a token of his continuing inspiring contributions to the field, but it also whets the curiosity for what will be next. During one of the always enlivening meetings with Allan, he mentioned that he is currently working on a weighty article in the field of literary linguistics - just as he anticipated in the quotation at the beginning of this article. Clearly, the real conclusion we can draw from that is that there is fortunately a lot more to come. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. The problem of speech genres. In Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin, 60-102. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2012. Sociolinguistics and English language studies. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 85: 1-17. Cook, Guy. 2005. Calm seas or troubled waters? Transitions, definitions and disagreements in applied linguistics. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15 (3): 282-301. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse. London: Routledge. Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 2001. Realism and imagination in the teaching of English. World Englishes 20 (3): 365-381. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, Michael A.K. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Revised by Christian Matthiessen. 4th edition. London: Routledge. James, Allan. 2000. English as a European Lingua Franca: current realities and existing dichotomies. In Jasone Cenoz and Ulrike Jessner (eds.), English in Europe. The Acquisition of a Third Language, 22-38. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. James, Allan. 2006a. Lingua Franca English as chimera: sociocultural and sociolinguistic perspectives. In Werner Delanoy & Laurenz Volkmann (eds.), Cultural Studies in the EFL Classroom, 221-232. Heidelberg: Winter. James, Allan. 2006b. Exploring the generic nature of International English. In Smiljana Komar & Uroš Mozetič (eds.), Literary Criticism as Metacommunity: A Festschrift for Meta Grosman. English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries (ELOPE) 3 (1-2): 75-83. Allan James’s contribution to theories of world Englishes 33 James, Allan. 2007. Second language acquisition and second language use: towards the Anglistic mediation of an applied linguistics dialogue. In Werner Delanoy, Jörg Helbig & Allan James (eds.), Towards a Dialogic Anglistics, 105-118. Berlin & Vienna: LIT Verlag. James, Allan. 2008a. New Englishes as post-geographic Englishes in lingua franca use. European Journal of English Studies 12 (1): 97-112. James, Allan. 2008b. The challenges of the Lingua Franca: English in the world and types of variety. In Claus Gnutzmann & Frauke Intemann (eds.), The Globalisation of English and the English Language Classroom, 133-144. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. James, Allan 2009. Theorising English and globalisation: semiodiversity and linguistic structure in Global English, World Englishes and Lingua Franca English. Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies 3 (1): 79-92. James, Allan. 2014. English as a visual language. Theorising the social semiotics of anglography in polylingual texts. English Text Construction 7 (1): 18-52. James, Allan. 2016. From code-mixing to mode-mixing in the European context. World Englishes 35 (2): 259-275. Jenkins, Jennifer. 2000. The Phonology of International English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kress, Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. McCarthy, Michael. 1998. Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mollin, Sandra. 2006. Euro-English. Assessing Variety Status. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Onysko, Alexander. 2016. Modeling world Englishes from the perspective of language contact. World Englishes 35 (2): 196-220. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul & Lionel Wee. 2011. A practice-based critique of English as a Lingua Franca. World Englishes 30 (3): 360-374. Pennycook, Alistair 2001. Critical Applied Linguistics. A Critical Approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pennycook, Alistair. 2007. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Pennycook, Alistair. 2010. Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Pitzl, Marie-Luise. Fthc. Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca: Idiom and Metaphor. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2001. Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as a Lingua Franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11: 133-158. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stefano Quaino Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 1. Introduction Welsh English (WE) is a general term used to describe the varieties of English spoken in Wales (Quaino 2011 & 2013: 45). One of the major linguistic influences on WE is obviously Welsh, the Celtic language which is spoken in several regions of Wales (especially in the North-West). This influence can be observed in many areas, such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and rhythm. This article will focus on the rhythm of Welsh English, with particular interest in the varieties spoken in Gwynedd and Ceredigion. 1 All the utterances which are presented in this article come from the Survey of the Anglo-Welsh Dialects, a project organized by David Parry (Swansea University) between the 1960s and the 1970s. Together with his colleagues, he visited every single Welsh county and interviewed hundreds of people, most of which were aged sixty or seventy. The excerpts have been processed and analysed through PRAAT, a computer program for prosodic analysis devised by two Dutch researchers, Paul Boersma and David Weenik (University of Amsterdam). Rhythm is strictly connected to accent and stress: a syllable which is given prominence is lengthened, while an unstressed syllable is reduced; this alternation of strong and weak syllables gives the speech a particular rhythm. In order to describe rhythm, it is necessary to consider longer chunks of speech, although even short intonation phrases (IP) can offer some elements of analytical interest; however, it should be noted that rhythm analysis is extremely complex and ambiguous since involuntary breaks and pauses interrupt the flow of the speech. 1 Gwynedd (North) and Ceredigion (West) are the two counties with the highest number of Welsh speakers. Stefano Quaino 36 2. The rhythm of Welsh / rhythm in Welsh When preparing a rhythm analysis, one should determine which syllables are given prominence by the speaker and which are reduced. Accented syllables usually present certain distinguishing features, such as great pitch movement, intensity, and lengthening; at the same time, unstressed syllables are reduced to a schwa and can, in certain contexts, even be truncated and eliminated. The rhythm of Welsh is governed by the Welsh Stress Rule (Williams 1989: 21). When considering the main accent within the intonation phrase, “in the vast majority of the Welsh polysyllabic words, primary stress falls on the penult […], whatever the number of the syllables in the word” (Williams & Ball 2001: 166). Williams also states that there are v ery few instances in which this rule is not followed, such as loose compounds (whose stress falls on the last syllable) and certain loanwords from English (whose stress falls on the antepenult) (1989: 21). The explanation of the Welsh Stress Rule can be traced in history, more specifically in the Old Welsh Accent Shift (Ball and Williams 2001: 182-185). It is presumed that Old Welsh had its main stress on the ultima, but an accent shift occurred between the ninth and thirteenth century. Together with the Welsh Stress Rules, there are other interesting elements which emerge from the analysis by Williams (1989: 47). For example, the stressed penultimate is usually weak, being not only reduced but sometimes even deleted; interestingly, lengthening does not appear to be a typical feature of the stressed syllable, but rather of the ultimate. As far as duration is concerned, Ball and Williams offer another important observation: The duration of the stressed penult is not significantly different from that of other non-final vowels in polysyllabic words (in antepenults or preantepenults). This would indicate that the factor influencing vowel duration is not stress, but rather word-final lengthening. The longest vowels (in stressed monosyllables and unstressed ultimas) are word-final. […]. This means that the only effect operating on vowel duration is final lengthening rather than stress. (2001: 179-180) Williams and Ball prepared some other sets of statistics to prove their hypotheses: their data reveals that stressed monosyllable vowels have the longest mean duration (106 ms), followed by unstressed ultima vowels (90 ms); stressed penult vowels are not long, with only unstressed antepenult being shorter. Containing a long vowel, the final ultimate syllable is seldom reduced: instead, schwa is much more common in stressed penult, which would be inconceivable in Standard English. The final remarks are related to consonants. Those found after a poststressed syllable are lengthened, as demonstrated by Williams’ research (1989: 46): the mean length is 109 ms, but this value is even greater if only Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 37 stops are considered (167 ms). Tench claims that consonants are lengthened also in monosyllabic words and ‘this phenomenon is transferred to Welsh English in toto (1990: 139). All these features can be clearly heard even without technical equipment: even the human ear is able to establish that the final unstressed syllable appears stronger and more prominent than the previous accented syllable. Because of these elements, there can be an erroneous perception regarding the position of the stress. Williams is very clear on this matter. She states that many untrained English people “judge the stress in Welsh to be on the final syllable rather than the penult, and thus are consistently wrong” (1989: 21). Tench (1990: 139) also focuses on the lengthening of consonants, claiming that this phenomenon is extremely pronounced in Welsh. He states that it occurs not only in consonants in intervocalic position but also in monosyllabic words. Pike (1945: 35) introduced the distinction between stress-timed rhythm and syllable-timed rhythm. The former occurs when it is the stress that determines the rhythmicity of an utterance. Unstressed syllables are pronounced faster and reduced to a schwa; because of this, the quantity of syllables per foot might vary. The other rhythm, instead, is marked by the syllables: reductions and quickening of syllables occur rarely, while ‘phrases with extra syllables take proportionally more time’. It is very difficult to present a definitive answer regarding the rhythmic nature of a language in these terms, even though it is possible to illustrate a general tendency toward a particular timing. Standard British English is usually considered stress-timed, while Italian is regarded as syllable-timed (Cruttenden 1997: 21). As noted by Tench (1990: 140) and Velleman (2006: 426), Welsh has a tendency towards syllable timing, with very few syllables being reduced or truncated. In the following sections, I will compare the patterns of Welsh with those of WE, trying to determine their similarities and their influence on each other. 3. Main features of the rhythm of Welsh English The analysis of the varieties of WE spoken in Ceredigion and Gwynedd has revealed the following main features, some of which can be related to the influence of Welsh:  the final unstressed syllable of a word is given prominence and is seldom reduced;  some utterances present a perfect alternation of weak and strong syllables; and Stefano Quaino 38  some utterances present an initial long series of syllables all of which record a very similar pitch value and intensity. The series terminates on a very strong final syllable. 3.1 Final syllable One of the most striking features of the Welsh language is the lengthening of the final unstressed syllable. This feature can be easily found in Welsh English, as shown by the following three examples. We can see how the words longer, servant, and artificial (all of which have their main accent on the penult) are pronounced. l- o- nger Time (s) 0 0.4761 0.238049887 Figure 1: Example of vowel lengthening in longer (Tregaron, Ceredigion - female) Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 39 servant Time (s) 0 0.6229 0.493312139 0.622902494 Figure 2: Example of vowel lengthening in servant (Tregaron, Ceredigion - male) A- rti fic ( ) al Time (s) 0 0.7332 Figure 3: Example of vowel lengthening in artificial (Tregaron, Ceredigion - male) Stefano Quaino 40 Figures 1-3 show the extreme consequence of the exaggerated prominence given to the final unstressed syllables. The rules of Standard English would require the words longer, servant, and artificial to have the stress on lon, ser, and fi; instead, the intensity given to ger, vant, and al transforms them into the stressed syllable of the utterance. It is also interesting to notice the fact that both long and ser are not reduced, the former being articulated for almost 300 ms. 3.2 Alternation weak / strong syllable Walters (1999) presents an interesting feature of the rhythm of Rhondda Valley English, 2 which can be summarised in this way: there is an overall tendency to avoid too many weak beats between stresses, so speakers have “a general reluctance to pronounce more than two successive weak syllables” (1999; Chapter 5 - Section 3.2). This feature, which has also been found in Ceredigion and Gwynedd, can be compared to the 2/ 4 musical rhythm and is caused by the alternation weak / strong syllable. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X (X) X X X Pad dock is a small place to keep Figure 4: Example of syllable alternation (Tregaron, Ceredigion - male) It is interesting to notice the pronunciation of small in Figure 4. There is one strong beat at the obtrusion, plus a second weaker beat during the tone. The reason for this separation could be found in the desire to avoid the collision of two strong accents (small and place). Table 1: Syllable duration of utterance in Figure 4 Syllable Duration pad- 153 ms dock 237 ms is 100 ms (very long / s/ ) a 21 ms small (first part) 209 ms small (second part) 97 ms place 152 ms 2 The Rhondda Valley is formed by sixteen communities living around the River Rhondda (South Wales). It presents a relatively high number of Welsh speakers. Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 41 to 73 ms keep 184 ms The tendency to avoid the clash of two accents has been found also in GE, as is shown in Figure 5. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X (X) X But once/ peo- ple star- ted to sell milk Figure 5: Example of syllable alternation (Trefor, Gwynedd - Female) Situations where clashes of stresses have been avoided:  once and people have been separated by a minor boundary  people has been clearly transformed into a disyllabic word, with ple containing a clear audible vowel / e/ , which is not a schwa, despite not being accented  sell has been divided into two parts (like “small” of Figure 4) 3.3 Series of level tones The next collection of examples will present the series of tones where the pitch in the recording exhibits the same (or similar) tone value. X X X X X X X X X X X X X They used to be in yoke Figure 6: Example of level tones (Llanon, Ceredigion - male) If we exclude to, all syllables present some consistency, with their lengths showing a certain degree of uniformity. Table 2 presents the duration of each syllable. Table 2: Duration of the syllables in Figure 6 Syllable Duration they 117 ms used 137 ms Stefano Quaino 42 to 71 ms be 104 ms in 111 ms yoke 330 ms Yoke is the final syllable and the culmination of the utterance; as a result, it is extremely marked and lengthened. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X I thought you would know what I mean Figure 7: Example of level tones (Llanon, Ceredigion - male) In the utterance shown in Figure 7, the syllables have not identical intensity values; instead, there is a slight decrease of intensity at would, which is followed by a rise which culminates at mean. Table 3 includes the lengths for every syllable, starting from thought; as one can see, if we exclude would, the other syllables present similar durations. Table 3: Duration of the syllables in Figure 7 Syllable Duration thought 135 ms you 143 ms would 89 ms know 157 ms what 121 ms I 140 ms mean 330 ms X X X X X X X X X X X X What e- ver you have Figure 8: Example of level tones (Ynys, Gwynedd - female) Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 43 Table 4: Duration of the syllables in Figure 8 Syllable Duration what- 91 ms e- 97 ms ver 96 ms you 73 ms have 180 ms In Figure 8, the syllables which precede the main stress (have) have a very similar duration with the exception of you. 4. Is Welsh English stress-timed or syllable-timed? This section will focus on statistics. I will try to determine two different values: 1. Average number of syllables between stresses 2. Average time between stresses. The analysis involves counting the number of weak syllables and the time interval which separates two stresses; using this calculation, it may be possible to determine whether Ceredigion English and Gwynedd English should be considered stressor syllable-timed. However, this kind of analysis has one major flaw which has to be accounted for: the researcher can consider only the utterances that have been pronounced with regularity and without interruptions. Due to the nature of free speech, many sentences have to be discarded because of breaks, slips of the tongue, and fillers. There is also another element to remember: the pace of speech delivery is personal and is strictly connected to the context and the situation. The same person can use a faster pace on certain occasions and a slower one on others. Therefore, one should interpret final statistics (especially those on time intervals) with care. Tables 5 and 6 present the average number of stresses between syllables in both Ceredigion and Gwynedd English. Table 5: Average number of stresses between syllables in Ceredigion English Location Average # of syllables Lampeter 1.73 Llanon 1.73 Stefano Quaino 44 Tregaron 1.40 Total 1.53 Table 6: Average number of stresses between syllables in Gwynedd English Location Average # of syllables Betws-y-coed 1.33 Botwnnog 1.77 Dolgarrog 1.48 Dolgellau 1.60 Gyffin 1.55 Trefor 1.90 Ynys 1.59 Total 1.64 This set of statistics shows interesting data: in GE, there is an average of 1.64 weak syllables between stresses, while in CE the quantity is even lower at 1.53. Although the alternation of weak and strong syllables is not achieved in every utterance, there is a tendency towards it, at least when speakers achieve some fluency in their speech. Only within the series of level tones at the beginning of the IP can we find four (or even more) unstressed syllables. The second set of statistics calculates the average distance (in ms) between stressed syllables. The data is divided into two parts: the first part focuses on utterances with a perfect alternation of weak and strong syllables (WS); the second part, by contrast, will focus on utterances where stresses (minor or major) are found every two or even three syllables (2+). Tables 7 and 8 below summarize the figures for both Ceredigion and Gwynedd English: Table 7: Distances between stresses in Ceredigion English Location Alternation Weak- Strong Stress (2+) Lampeter 325 ms 551 ms Llanon 349 ms 528 ms Tregaron 343 ms 505 ms Total 327 ms 518 ms Influence of Welsh on the rhythm of Welsh English 45 Table 8: Distances between stresses in Gwynedd English Location Alternation Weak- Strong Stress (2+) Betws-y-coed 415 ms 715 ms Botwnnog 436 ms 565 ms Dolgarrog 438 ms 644 ms Dolgellau 393 ms 630 ms Gyffin 462 ms 575 ms Trefor 510 ms 684 ms Ynys 341 ms 626 ms Total 439 ms 642 ms Although it can be risky to give a definitive statement, it appears that GE speakers tend to have a slower pace than CE speakers. In CE, the average distance between two stressed syllables is 327 ms for WS and 518 ms for 2+, while in GE it is 439 ms for WS and 642 for 2+. Although giving a definitive answer on the characteristics of a whole language or a language variety is very difficult, if not impossible, many speakers of both Ceredigion and Gwynedd show one interesting feature: the ratio between WS and 2+ suggests that unstressed syllables have some consistency and length, so that a syllable-timed structure does not appear implausible. Although an unstressed syllable is shorter than a stressed one, it does not lose its consistency, and it is not completely reduced. These findings chime in with an observation made by David Crystal. He states that certain accents of English “display a noticeable tendency towards syllabletiming - certain varieties of Welsh English, for example” (1995: 178). 5. Final considerations In the previous sections, I have analysed several utterances produced by Welsh English speakers, and I have presented the most typical rhythmical patterns. Several features reveal that the influence of Welsh over Welsh English is rather evident. Different from other languages, Welsh has a very particular feature: the final unstressed syllable is extremely pronounced, sometimes being even stronger than the previous stressed syllable. This phenomenon is one of the most striking features of the English spoken in Ceredigion and Gwynedd, which are the two counties with the highest number of Welsh speakers. As presented by Tench and Velleman, Welsh can be considered a syllable-timed language: all syllables (both stressed and unstressed) present some degree of consistency, with very few being reduced or truncated. Even Stefano Quaino 46 though a definitive answer is impossible to reach, my findings seem to show a similar tendency for Welsh English. References Ball, Martin. J. & Briony Williams. 2001. Welsh Phonetics. Lewinston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Melles Press. Boersma, Paul. & David Weenink. 2008. Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Version 5.0.32) [Computer program]. Retrieved 12 th January, 2016, from http: / / www.praat.org/ Cruttenden, Alan. 1995. Rises in English. In Jack Windsor Lewis (ed.), Studies in General English and Phonetics: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor, 155-173. London & New York: Routledge. Crystal, David. 1995. Documenting rhythmical change. In Jack Windsor Lewis (ed.), Studies in General English and Phonetics: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor, 174-179. London & New York: Routledge. Pike, Kenneth. 1947. The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Quaino, Stefano. 2011. The Intonation of Welsh English - The Case of Ceredigion and Gwynedd. PhD Thesis. Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt. Quaino, Stefano. 2013. Pitch alignment in Welsh English - The case of rising tones in Gwynedd. In Biljana Cubrovic & Tatjana Paunović (eds.), Focus of English Phonetics, 45-69. Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Tench, Paul. 1990. The pronunciation of English in Abercrave. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), English in Wales. Diversity, Conflict and Change, 130-141. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Velleman, Shelley. 2006. Variation in developing phonologies: comments on Vihman and colleagues, Docherty and colleagues, and Scobbie. In Louis Goldstein, D. H. Whalen & Catherine T. Best (eds.), Laboratory Phonology 8, 423-439. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Walters, J. Roderick. 1999. A Study of the Segmental and Supra-Segmental Phonology of Rhondda Valleys English. PhD Thesis, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales. Condensed version published on-line by the University of Glamorgan (2006). http: / / resnt1.isd.glam.ac.uk/ rhondda_valleys_english/ (accessed 10th January 2016) Williams, Briony. 1989. Stress in Modern Welsh. PhD thesis 1983, distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club. Smiljana Komar The relationship between musical training and the acquisition of intonation in foreign learners of English Musical training and the acquisition of intonation Abstract If intonation is understood as a melody of speech, then it is reasonable to expect a close correlation between musical skills and the acquisition of intonation in speech. The present paper presents the results of two auditory perception tests of three main English tones (the fall, the rise and the fallrise) which were carried out with 47 university students of English, whose L1 is Slovene and who were enrolled in the 2 nd year of BA studies at the English Department at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. The first test took place before the training of English intonation (30 teaching hours) and the second one after it. Half of the participants (N=23) had at least 4 years of musical education. The perception of the tones was tested on monosyllabic words, short phrases and sentences with varied locations of nuclear tones. The results confirm our initial hypothesis that in the pretraining tests students with musical education will score significantly better in the tone recognition tasks than their musically non-educated colleagues. The results obtained after thirty teaching hours, which consisted of theory as well as perception and production practice, indicate a significant improvement also in musically non-educated students. This proves our second hypothesis that systematic perception training, which includes visual and auditory stimuli, can have a positive effect on the recognition and identification of tones. 1. Introduction Language and music have one feature in common: both are rule-based hierarchical systems. The formation of words, phrases, clauses and sentences in language is governed by a set of grammatical rules, whereas the harmonic structure of music is the result of underlying principles how to combine chords, keys, tempo, volume and duration. Speech, as one of the modes of linguistic expression, has even more similarities with music than language as a rule-based system. It is common knowledge that the main characteristic of speech is intonation, often referred to as melody of speech (Bolinger 1985: Smiljana Komar 48 28). Its analysis concerns the prosodic features such as tone, pitch height (key), rhythm, volume, timbre and duration. There are scholars who believe that some professional speakers use music-based techniques to shape their messages and deliver them in the most effective way (Cohen et al. 2011). Native speakers use intonation without much conscious planning. Even when asked to think about it, they are often unable to describe the pitch patterns they use. In other words, speakers are not aware of intonation as long as it fits their expectations. This often happens in a foreign language too. Theoretical and practical knowledge of English intonation is one of the essential elements in the teaching of English phonology, phonetics and prosody to the BA students of English at the English Department of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. The intonation course, which is part of the 2 nd year curriculum, consists of thirty teaching hours spread over the whole academic year. It has become a regular practice to carry out pretraining and post-training recognition tests of intonation. Two findings regularly occur: first, prior to the teaching and training of intonation, students generally confuse pitch height with pitch movement. Second, after intensive sensitization training, most of the students improve the recognition and analysis of different pitch contours. Informal observations and discussions with the students show that some of them very quickly and easily acquire intonation analysis skills, while others are slow and need more practice and individual consultations. It often turns out that the students with better intonation analysis skills have received some musical training. Studies which analyse the relationship between musical aptitude and intonation analysis skills are few. Mackenzie Beck (2003) claims that musical talent together with musical training is a good predicator for general phonetic skills. A study by Dankovičová et al. (2007) on English university students who have received some basic training in intonation analysis shows significantly positive correlations between musical training and intonation task scores, such as locating the nucleus and identifying the nuclear tone. These findings and our own observations motivated us to carry out pretraining and post-training recognition tests where the students were also required to mention if they had received any musical training and, if so, for how many years. This paper, which presents and discusses the results of those tests, is structured in the following way. In Section 2, we first present the findings of some studies in the domain of neuropsychology which are relevant for our understanding of the processing of music and speech in native as well as non-native second-language learners. These findings also serve as the basis for our research questions and hypotheses. In Section 3, we describe the subjects, method and stimuli for testing. Section 4 presents and discusses the Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 49 results of the pre-training tests. In the beginning of Section 5, we first briefly explain the intonation training techniques and then move on to the presentation and discussion of the post-training results. In Section 6, we sum up the main findings of the perception tests and suggest future research in the domain of second-language acquisition of intonation. 2. Theoretical overview, research questions and hypotheses 2.1 Theoretical overview If music and speech employ the same acoustic features and exhibit a hierarchical organization of different levels, then it is reasonable to expect that there is a strong correlation between the processing of music and speech. During the last two decades, researchers have shown growing interest in the relationship between music and speech. In the field of neuropsychology, Patel (2008) has proposed that the processing of speech and music relies on common processes and developed the OPERA hypothesis (2011) 1 , according to which there are five essential conditions that have to be met for musical training to have a positive effect on speech encoding. First, there is the overlap of the brain regions responsible for the processing of acoustic features in speech and music. Second, music requires more precision in the processing of acoustic features. Third, music activates positive emotions. Fourth, musical activities require frequent repetitions, and fifth, musical activities also require focused attention. According to the OPERA hypothesis, musical activities which meet these five criteria will have a positive effect on speech processing. Other investigations in the field of neuropsychology have proved that the processing of speech and language on the one hand, and the processing of music, on the other, is modular in nature. The traditional generalization that the processing of speech is localized in the left and music processing in the right hemisphere has turned out to be too simplistic. The processing of speech and music is very complex and involves cooperation between the hemispheres. As far as intonation of speech is concerned, Zatorre et al. (1992) claim that pitch is predominantly processed in the right hemisphere, while the linguistic meaning of intonation is processed in the left hemisphere. Further investigations of the relationship between musical melody and speech intonation have indicated important differences regarding the way pitch information is processed in music and in speech. Zatorre (2012) suggests the existence of two mechanisms responsible for the processing of pitch in music and speech. One mechanism involves an 1 OPERA is an acronyme for Overlap, Precision, Emotion, Repetition and Attention. Smiljana Komar 50 approximate analysis of the pitch contour (speech) and the other a more detailed pitch representation which is unique and specific to music. A number of studies dealing with the relationship between musical training and perception of intonation have investigated the perception of lexical tones in Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese by native as well as by non-native musicians and non-musicians (Alexander et al. 2005; Lee et al. 2008; Mok et al. 2012). They have shown that listeners with musical training, regardless of whether they are native or non-native speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese, identify lexical tones better than non-musicians. This is consistent with the hypothesis that musical and linguistic mechanisms belong to overlapping domains, as well as with the OPERA hypothesis according to which music activities require more precision than speech. Research into second language acquisition has mainly focused on segmental features and proved that native language definitely influences and affects the perception of second language segments. Flege (1995) has developed a model of second language learning according to which the phones of L1 and L2 co-exist in a common phonological space and interact with one another. In the domain of the effects of a native language on the perception of prosody, studies investigating prominence and stress perception have also proved that the native language affects the perception of prominence and stress. Paperkamp and Dupoux (2002) argue that French are “deaf” to stress contrasts because French does not have lexical stress contrasts. In their crosslanguage study, in which they have tested the perception of lexical stress in native speakers of French, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish, they have found out that some speakers are more sensitive to lexical stress than others, where “the size of the ‘deafness’ effect correlates with the ease with which the stress regularity can be acquired by infants“ (2002: 18). There are very few studies which look into the effects of native language on the perception of intonation contours. Grabe et al. (2003) have investigated the perception of English intonation by English, Spanish and Chinese listeners who were required to rate the degree of difference between seven falling and four rising intonation contours. They have found out that all participants manage to distinguish between the falling and the rising contours, but the experience with the native language influences their perception of different modulations of the basic falling and rising contours. They have concluded that the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours relies on universal auditory mechanisms, while the perception of more subtle variations is influenced by the native language. Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 51 2.2 Research questions and hypotheses Motivated by the above findings on the processing of music and speech and by the research on the influence of the native language on the perception of second-language intonation, we decided to carry out pre-training and posttraining perception tests of three English tones (the fall, the rise, the fall-rise) with native speakers of Slovene. The tests had the purpose to provide us with enough data to be able to answer the following research questions and to test two hypotheses. The research questions are the following: RQ1: Is there a positive correlation between musical training and perception of three English tones in second-language learners who are native speakers of Slovene? RQ2: Is there a difference in perception of the fall-rise tone, which is a foreign tone for native Slovene speakers, between musically educated and musically non-educated Slovene students? RQ3: Is there a positive correlation between systematic intonation training and perception of tones in musically educated and musically non-educated students? Our first hypothesis is that musically educated students will perform better in the pre-training tone recognition tests than their musically non-educated colleagues. The second hypothesis is that after systematic sensitization training, which includes auditory and visual stimuli, the musically noneducated students will improve their intonation analysis skills. 3. Subjects, method and testing stimuli In the academic year 2013/ 2014, 47 Slovene students of English, enrolled in the second-year of BA studies, took part in the recognition tests. None of them had received any previous training in English intonation. Prior to the recognition tests, the students were asked to answer a short questionnaire about the type and length of musical training. Half of them (n=23) had at least 4 years of musical training playing different musical instruments. 2 The first testing was carried out at the beginning of the course on English intonation, the second one after 30 hours of intonation theory and sensitization training. The pre-training and post-training tests were the same. The participants were supposed to choose among three English tones: the fall (\), the rise (/ ) and the fall-rise (\/ ). The fall and the rise are simple tones and also occur in the Slovene language. The fall-rise is an unfamiliar 2 The instruments that the students studied were the following: piano (9), guitar (6), violin (5) and flute (3). Smiljana Komar 52 tone for native speakers of Slovene. It is a compound tone which consists of a two-way pitch movement: the high falling and the low rising. In an Intonation Phrase (IP) where the nucleus is followed by a longer string of syllables (the tail), the high falling pitch movement is realized on the nuclear syllable while the low rising pitch movement spreads through the syllables of the tail. The tests consisted of three tasks:  Recognition of tones in 15 monosyllabic words: \now, \/ good, / first, / six, \Spain, \/ grilled, \/ stay, / true, \soon, \why, / bad, / part, \/ come, \John's, \/ France  Recognition of tones in 12 polysyllabic words: \rubbish, \/ crazy, \/ thousands, / carrots, \virtually, \/ Kensington, re/ lax, as\sistant, re\/ grettably, Re/ becca, e/ xactly, ac\cept  Recognition of tones in 15 sentences or intonation phrases (IP): 1) You're \right! || 2) I've re ↘ paired the \/ windows. || 3) It's \Jim, I think. || 4) ˈ Was she / hurt? || 5) I \/ think so. || 6) \/ Guns don't kill people. || 7) You were \there. || 8) \/ Most of it. || 9) ˈ Did he / finish it? || 10) ˈ Are you / sure then? || 11) Pretty \reasonable. || 12) ˈ Would you like to / join us? || 13) So \that was the trouble. || 14) Is ˈ fruit ex/ pensive in this country? || 15) Well \/ apples are. The distribution of tones was random, but with an equal number of occurrences per task. The nuclear syllables were underlined and instructions were given how to mark the tones. The selected words and IPs were from Wells (2006) and recorded by a trained speaker. It was a conscious decision to read all falling tones as high falls, and all rising tones as low rises since these two pitch movements are the component elements of the fall-rise tone. 4. Pre-training tests 4.1 Recognition of tones in monosyllabic words The results presented in Figures 1-3 show the recognition of the three tones in monosyllabic words. Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 53 Figure 1: Recognition of falls in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The recognition of the fall in monosyllabic words was significantly better in ME students (60-100%) than in their NME colleagues (45-80%). The latter confused the fall with the rise particularly in words now, Spain and why, and to a smaller degree in the word soon. This may suggest that ME students were more sensitive to the pitch movement, whereas NME students confused the pitch movement with the pitch height. The recognition of the fall in word John's was best in both groups. Figure 2: Recognition of rises in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students Smiljana Komar 54 The recognition of rises in monosyllabic words shows a similar trend for ME as well as NME students: the former performed better in the first four words, whereas the recognition of the last word (part) was nearly the same in both groups. ME students perceived the rise in the word bad by 30 percent better than their NME colleagues. Looking at misperceptions, we can observe a difference between the two groups: ME students misperceived the rise as the fall-rise, whereas NME students mainly heard the fall. This confirms the assumption that ME students are better at perceiving the pitch movement than NME students who confuse the pitch movement with the pitch height. Figure 3: Recognition of fall-rises in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The recognition of the fall-rise tone in monosyllabic words was the worst of all three tones. The difference between the ME and NME participants is insignificant in the first three words, whereas in the words come and France ME students performed by over 20 percent better than their NME colleagues. As far as misperceptions of the first three words are concerned, we can see that the fall and the rise were equally chosen by both groups of participants. The word come was misperceived as the fall by ME participants, whereas NME participants heard the rising tone. The word France was misperceived as the rise by both groups. Contrary to our previous observations of misperceptions of falls and rises in NME students, when they confused the pitch movement with the pitch height, we can see that the perception of the fall-rise tone as the rise in NME students was significantly Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 55 higher than in ME students, who equally misperceived the fall-rise tone in the words good, grilled and stay either as the fall or as the rise. 4.2 Recognition of tones in polysyllabic words The results presented in Figures 4-6 show the recognition of the three tones in polysyllabic words. The list of 12 polysyllabic words consisted of words with different positions of primary stress. The words rubbish, crazy, thousands, carrots, virtually and Kensington were stressed on the first syllable, whereas the words relax, assistant, regrettably, Rebecca, exactly and accept were stressed on the second syllable. The number of unaccented syllables following the stressed one ranged from zero to three. Figure 4: Recognition of falls in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students There are two important observations regarding the recognition of the fall in polysyllabic words. First, both groups of participants misperceived the fall in all four words as the rise. Second, ME students scored better than NME students in the word virtually, while NME students were better (20%) in the word rubbish. The recognition of the fall as the rise in words assistant and accept was the same for both groups. It seems that both groups confused the pitch movement with the pitch height, which is probably due to a small step up in pitch between the unstressed and the stressed syllable. Smiljana Komar 56 Figure 5: Recognition of rises in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The same trend as the recognition of falls in polysyllabic words can be observed in the recognition of rises: both groups misperceived the rise as a fall. The only exception to that is the word relax where a majority of ME students recognised the tone correctly, while a majority of their NME colleagues heard a fall. The differences in scores in the remaining three words are insignificant. Figure 6: Recognition of fall-rises in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 57 The correct recognition of the fall-rise tone is identical in both groups and generally very low (10-35%) with the exception of the words thousands and regrettably where 20 % more NME than ME students correctly identified the tone. Another interesting observation is that the main misperception of the fall-rise tone is a rise. ME and NME students heard a rise instead of the fallrise in the first two words (crazy, thousands), which are both stressed on the first syllable, whereas the fall-rise in the word Kensington was recognised as a rise by more ME (85%) than NME students (58%). 4.3 Recognition of tones in sentences The results presented in Figures 7-9 show the recognition of the three tones in 15 short sentences. The distribution of the three tones was random but with an equal number of occurrences of each tone. The intonation structure of the sentences varied: some sentences contained only the nuclear syllable, others also contained a pre-nuclear pitch prominent syllable, the so-called head. 3 The nuclear syllables were underlined and the participants were instructed to pay attention to the pitch movement of the underlined syllables. The sentences which contained the falling nuclear tone were: 1) You're \right! 3) It's \Jim, I think. 7) You were \there. 11) ˈ Pretty \reasonable. 13) So \that was the trouble. The intonation structure of sentences 1, 3, 7 and 13 consisted of a low pre-head, a nuclear tone and a low level tail. Sentence 11 consisted of a high level head, a nuclear tone and a low level tail. 3 The terms head, pre-head, nucleus and tail are used by O'Connor and Arnold (1975) to refer to different parts of the intonation phrase structure. Head refers to the string of syllables between the first pitch-prominent syllable to the nucleus, which is the last pitch prominent and the only obligatory syllable in an IP. Unstressed syllables preceding the head are referred to as the pre-head, while all the syllables following the nucleus are referred to as the tail. Smiljana Komar 58 Figure 7: Recognition of falls in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The recognition of the fall in sentences follows the trend already observed in polysyllabic words: in sentences 1, 3, 11 and 13 both groups of students misperceived the fall as a rise. The differences between the two groups in sentences 3 and 11 are insignificant, whereas in sentences 1 and 13 twenty percent more NME than ME students misperceived the fall as a rise. The only sentence where the recognition of the tone was correct in both groups was sentence 7, where ME students (90%) scored significantly better than their NME colleagues (67%). The sentences which contained the rising nuclear tone were: 4) ˈ Was she / hurt? 9) ˈ Did he / finish it? 10) Are you / sure then? 12) ˈ Would you like to / join us? 14) Is ˈ fruit ex/ pensive in this country? The intonation structure of sentences 4, 9, 10 and 12 consisted of a high-level head, a low rise and a rising tail; in sentence 14 the high-level head was preceded by a low-level pre-head. In this sentence the tail was longest - it consisted of five syllables which should in theory ease the perception of the rising tone. Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 59 Figure 8: Recognition of rises in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The tendency to misperceive rises as falls was particularly evident in sentences 9, 12 and 14 in both groups of students. Only sentence 4 was perceived correctly by both groups; the NME group scored slightly better (by 10%) than the ME group. In sentence 10, we can observe an equal distribution of the three tones in both groups. The ME group perceived the tone correctly (42%), whereas the same percentage (42%) of NME students misperceived it as a fall. The other interesting observation is that the rise was perceived as a fall-rise in sentences 4, 10 and 12 by the ME group, whereas the NME group misperceived the rise as a fall-rise in sentences 9 and 10 with an equal score of twenty and thirty percent, respectively. In sentences 12 and 14, NME students also gave preference to the fall-rise tone instead of the rise. The sentences which contained the fall-rising nuclear tone were: 2) I've re ↘ paired the \/ windows. 5) I \/ think so. 6) \/ Guns don't kill people. 8) \/ Most of it. 15) Well \/ apples are. The intonation structure varied: sentence 2 consisted of a low pre-head, a falling head, a fall-rise nuclear tone and a rising tail. In sentences 5 and 15 a fall-rise nuclear tone was preceded by a low pre-head and followed by a short rising tail (one syllable only). In sentences 6 and 8 a fall-rise nuclear tone occurred on the first syllable of the sentence and was followed by a rising tail. Smiljana Komar 60 Figure 9: Recognition of fall-rises in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students The recognition of the fall-rise tone was similar in both groups. They all misperceived the fall-rise as a rise but, interestingly, the ME group more than the NME group. The scores of the correct recognition of the tone, as well as its incorrect recognition as a fall, were nearly the same in both groups. It seems that ME students were more sensitive to the pitch movement at the end of the sentence than at the beginning. 5. Post-training tests We believe that the recognition of intonation improves to a significant extent if the students are instructed in the basic rules of intonation, such as tonality, tonicity and the structure of an IP. Equipped with theoretical knowledge, they can proceed to ear-training exercises whose purpose is to sensitize the students to different tones and tunes. The sensitization training should consist of (1) exposure to auditory stimuli, (2) upgrading auditory stimuli with visual feedback and (3) identification of all three tones in texts. 4 After 30 hours of teaching and intonation training, we carried out the same perception testing as in the pre-training test. We used exactly the same test items as in the pre-training test. The purpose of this was two-fold: first, to see if the intonation sensitization process increased the students' ability to 4 For a detailed description of our sensitization training see Komar (2015). Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 61 recognise the three English tones more easily and correctly; and second, to find out whether both groups of students made an equal improvement. 5.1 Recognition of tones in monosyllabic words Figures 10-12 show the recognition of the three tones in monosyllabic words in pre-training and post-training tests in ME and NME students. Figure 10: Recognition of falls in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) The recognition of the fall in monosyllabic words significantly improved in both groups of students. In other words, MNE students caught up with their ME colleagues in post-training recognition tests. There is an insignificant decrease (10% or 2 students) in the perception of the fall in the word soon for ME. Smiljana Komar 62 Figure 11: Recognition of rises in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post- training tests) Although both groups improved their recognition of rises in monosyllabic words, the improvement of ME students is more significant than the improvement of NME students, where we can observe some improvement in the words first, six and bad, but hardly any improvement in the words true and part. Figure 12: Recognition of fall-rises in monosyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post- training tests) Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 63 The recognition of the fall-rise in monosyllabic words in the post-training test shows a different picture than in the pre-training test where the correct scores in both groups were nearly the same for the words good, grilled and stay, but significantly different in the words come and France where ME students were better than NME students. In post-training recognition tests, ME students made a significant improvement in the words grilled and stay, whereas in the words good, come and France the correct recognition decreased. The NME group, on the other hand, made a significant improvement in all five words. 5.2 Recognition of tones in polysyllabic words Figures 13-15 show the recognition of the three tones in polysyllabic words in pre-training and post-training tests in ME and NME students. Figure 13: Recognition of falls in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) The recognition of falls in polysyllabic words increased in both groups. ME students improved their recognition most significantly in the words rubbish (by 60%) and accept (by 45%), whereas NME students performed significantly better in the words virtually (by 60%) and accept (by 60%). Smiljana Komar 64 Figure 14: Recognition of rises in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) The recognition of rises in polysyllabic words also significantly improved in both groups. Over 70 percent of ME students correctly identified the tone in the words carrots, relax and Rebecca, whereas the correct perception in the word exactly was just below 50 percent. The correct recognition of the rise in all words ranged between 60 and 80 percent in NME students. Figure 15: Recognition of fall-rises in polysyllabic words in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post- training tests) Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 65 Similarly, the recognition of the fall-rise significantly increased in both groups of students. Between 49 percent (regrettably) and 65 percent (crazy) of ME students recognised correctly the fall-rise tone in all four words. The correct recognition of the tone in NME students ranged between 40 percent (Kensington) and 75 percent (crazy). An insignificant decrease in the correct recognition of the tone can be observed in the word regrettably (by 8%). 5.3 Recognition of tones in sentences Figures 16-18 show the recognition of the three tones in sentences in pretraining and post-training tests in ME and NME students. Figure 16: Recognition of falls in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) The recognition of the fall in sentences improved in both groups in all sentences except in sentence 7 where the ME group scored significantly better in the pre-training test. The difference between the pre-training and post-training results is 30 percent in favour of the pre-training recognition. In the remaining four sentences, the results in both groups are nearly identical. Compared to the pre-training results, NME students improved more than ME students. Smiljana Komar 66 Figure 17: Recognition of rises in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) The recognition of the rise in ME students improved in sentences 9, 10, 12 and 14, but remained the same as in the pre-training test in sentence 4. Most significant improvements were achieved in sentences 12 (by 40%) and 14 (by 52%). NME students also improved their recognition of the rise in sentences 12 (by 38%), 14 (by 28%) and 9 (by 10%), while the recognition remained unchanged in sentence 10 and decreased in sentence 4 (by 10%). Figure 18: Recognition of fall-rises in sentences in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) students (pre-training and post-training tests) Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 67 The recognition of the fall-rise tone in sentences in the pre-training test was very poor in both groups of students. The results of the post-training recognition test indicate nearly identical improvement in sentences 2 (by 45%) and 5 (by 35%in ME and 25% in NME) for both groups, whereas the recognition of the tone in sentences 6, 8 and 15 was most significant in ME students (in sentence 6 by 30%, in sentence 8 by 45% and in sentence 15 by 55%). NME students also improved their recognition of the tone in these sentences but to a smaller degree (in sentence 6 by 15%, in sentence 8 by 10% and in sentence 15 by 13%). 6. Discussion The purpose of the pre-training and post-training perception tests was to provide answers to three research questions and to prove two hypotheses. Our first research question addresses the correlation between musical training and the perception of three English tones in second-language learners who are native speakers of Slovene. Following the findings of several studies in the domains of neuropsychology and second language learning, which testify to a positive correlation between musical training and the perception of lexical tones, we posited a hypothesis that in the auditory pre-training recognition tests of three English tones the group of students with some musical training (ME) would perform better than their colleagues with no musical training (NME). The analysis of the results gives a positive answer to our first research question and confirms the hypothesis that in general ME students performed better in all three types of recognition tests than their NME colleagues. There are, however, interesting differences between the two groups regarding the misperceptions of individual tones. They vary according to the type of stimulus (i.e. monosyllabic words, polysyllabic words and sentences). Although the correct recognition of the tones was highest in monosyllabic words in both groups, we observe that NME students most frequently misperceived the falls as rises and rises as falls. ME students, on the other hand, misperceived rises as fall-rises. We may conclude that ME students are more sensitive to the pitch movement, whereas NME students confuse pitch movement with pitch height. The results of the recognition of tones in polysyllabic words show a similar trend regarding the misperceptions of individual tones with falls being recognised as rises, and rises as falls by both groups of students. This is particularly the case with those polysyllabic words which are not stressed on the first syllable, making the unstressed preceding syllables either lower in pitch (for the falling tone) or higher in pitch (for the rising tone). Because of this step-up or step-down in pitch between the unstressed and stressed Smiljana Komar 68 syllables, both groups of listeners confused pitch height and pitch movement. The same observation is true regarding the misperception of tones in sentences. Our second research question addresses the perception of the fall-rise tone in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated (NME) Slovene students of English. The English fall-rise tone is a compound tone which consists of two pitch movements: the high falling and the low rising. Since this is an unknown pitch movement for native Slovene speakers, we expected the listeners to recognize the fall-rise either as a fall or as a rise. We were particularly interested to find out if there was a difference in the perception of the tone by ME and NME students. The results indicate that there are both similarities and slight differences in the perception of the tone between the two groups of listeners. As far as similarities in the perception of the fall-rise tone in the two groups is concerned, we have to conclude that the tone was correctly perceived by a very small number of listeners, with the ME group having scored slightly better mainly in monosyllabic words. Regarding the differences in the perception of the tone, we observe that the ME group misperceived the fall-rise in monosyllabic words, where both pitch movements are realised on the same syllable, equally as a fall and a rise, whereas the NME group mainly misperceived the tone as a rise. In polysyllabic words and sentences both groups misperceived the fall-rise as a rise, with the ME group leading the NME group. The results of auditory post-training recognition tests of three English tones by ME and NME Slovene students of English provide a positive answer to our third research question which concerned the correlation between a systematic intonation training and perception of tones in musically educated (ME) and musically non-educated students (NME). Our results indicate a general improvement of the recognition of all three English tones in all three types of stimuli. In the recognition of the falling tone both groups obtained very similar results in all three types of stimuli. Although the NME group generally improved in the recognition of the rising tone, they still lag behind the ME group in monosyllabic words and sentences. Recognition of the fall-rise tone not only significantly improved in both groups, but the scores of NME students were nearly identical with the ones of ME students in all three types of stimuli. This confirms our second hypothesis which presupposes a positive correlation between systematic visual and auditory sensitization training and the recognition of the fall-rise tone. Musical training and the acquisition of intonation 69 7. Conclusion The paper discusses the correlation between musical training and the recognition of three English tones in non-native students of English. Our findings indicate that musical training positively influences the recognition of intonation in speech. It seems that musically educated Slovene students of English listening to English are more sensitive to changes of the pitch movement and better distinguish between the pitch height and movement than their musically non-educated colleagues. The other important finding concerns the positive effect of systematic audio-visual sensitization training on the recognition of English pitch contours. We observe that musically educated and non-educated listeners benefit from the sensitization training to a point where the differences in the recognition of English intonation between the two groups become minimal. Regarding future research, we suggest a more targeted study in which the participants would be only musicians who play different instruments. It would not be surprising to find out that players of different musical instruments exhibit a different degree of sensitivity to pitch variations. We also believe that a study carried out among singers would yield different results compared to the ones obtained from players of musical instruments. References Alexander, Jennifer A., Patrick C. M. Wong & Ann R. Bradlow. 2005. Lexical tone perception in musicians and non-musicians. Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. 397-400. Bolinger, Dwight. 1985. Intonation and its Parts: Melody in Spoken English. London: Edward Arnold. Cohen, Steven D., Thomas E. Wei, Daniel C. DeFraia & Christopher J. Drury. 2011. The music of speech: layering musical elements to deliver powerful messages. Relevant Rhetoric (2). Accessed February, 2016. http: / / isites.harvard.edu/ fs/ docs/ icb.topic657116.files/ The%20Music%20of%20Speech_Distribution.pdf/ . Dankovičová, Jana, Jill House, Anna Crooks & Katie Jones. 2007. The relationship between musical skills, musical training, and intonation analysis skills. Language and Speech 50 (2): 177-225. Flege, James. 1995. Second-language speech learning: theory, findings, and problems. In Winifred Strange (ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-language research, 229-273. Timonium, MD: York Press. Grabe, Esther, Burton S. Rosner, José E. García-Albea & Xiaolin Zhou. 2003. Perception of English intonation by English, Spanish and Chinese listeners. Language and Speech 46 (4): 375-401. Smiljana Komar 70 Komar, Smiljana. 2015. Techniques to improve the perception of the English fallrise tone. In Joanna Przedlacka, John Maidment & Michael Ashby (eds.), Proceedings of the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference. London: PTLC. https: / / www.ucl.ac.uk/ pals/ study/ cpd/ cpdcourses/ ptlc/ proceedings_2015/ PTLC_2015_Komar.pdf Lee, Chao-Yang & Tsun-Hui Hung. 2008. Identification of Mandarin tones by English-speaking musicians and non-musicians. Acoustic Society of America 124: 3235-3248. DOI: 10.1121/ 1.2990713. Mackenzie Beck, Janet. 2003. Is it possible to predict students’ ability to develop skills in practical phonetics? Proceeding of the 15 th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona: 2833-2836. Mok, Peggy P. K. & Donghui Zuo. 2012. The separation between music and speech: evidence from perception of Cantonese tones. Acoustic Society of America 132 (4): 2711-2720. DOI: 10.1121/ 1.4747010. O’Connor, Joseph Desmond & Gordon Frederic Arnold. 1975. Intonation of Colloquial English. Second Edition. London: Longman. Paperkamp, Sharon & Emmanuel Dupoux. 2002. A typological study of stress »deafness«. In Carlos Gussenhoven & Natasha Warner (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 7, 203-240. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Patel, Aniruddth D. 2008. Music, Language, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Patel, Aniruddth D. 2011. Why would musical training benefit the neural encoding of speech? The OPERA hypothesis. Frontiers of Psychology 2: 142. doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2011.00142. Zatorre, Robert J., Alan C. Evans, Ernst Meyer & Albert Gjedde. 1992. Lateralisation of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing. Science 256: 846-849. Zatorre, Robert J. & Shari R. Baum. 2012. Musical melody and speech intonation: singing a different tune? PLoS Biology 10 (7): e1001372. doi: 10.1371/ journal.pbio.1001372. Wells, John C. 2006. English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott Charting EFL writing development by means of the Scope - Substance error taxonomy. A pilot study Charting EFL writing development Abstract This article describes a pilot study that attempts to explore the potential of the Scope - Substance error taxonomy (Dobric & Sigott 2014; Lennon 1991) as a tool for describing the change of error incidence in the writing of three groups of Turkish pre-university students of English. Errors in the writing samples are identified and described in terms of the Scope - Substance error taxonomy. This taxonomy was developed to increase the reliability of error identification in writing samples. The article aims to refine the analytic tool and to present tentative results that shed some light on how writing ability develops. 1. Introduction While studies of the development of a wide array of language competences abound, comparatively less is known about the development of writing ability. This may be due to the fact that the skills involved in written production are highly complex and involve all levels of linguistic organisation, ranging from the level of the individual word to the level of discourse. Accordingly, information about features that develop in student writing is necessarily fragmentary. Moreover, attempts to categorise errors in student writing samples have always been beset by the difficulty of identifying errors in writing performances in a reliable way. Clearly, describing features in student writing with the aim of charting progress in writing competence has to take into account norm-adequate as well as norm-deviant features. Eventually, only a combination of the two types of characteristics will enable a thorough description of how writing ability develops. In this article, the focus is on norm-deviant features. The aim of the article is twofold. On the one hand, it describes the process of piloting the Scope - Substance error taxonomy (Dobrić & Sigott 2014; Lennon 1991) on English writing samples collected from three groups of students at CEFR levels A2, B1 and B2. The three groups were composed of preuniversity students at Akdeniz University, Antalya, and at Hacettepe Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 72 University, Ankara, in Turkey. On the other hand, the article attempts to examine to what extent the pilot results might shed light on how writing ability develops by charting the incidence of error types in writing samples from learners at three different levels of ability. 2. Empirical study 2.1 Data In total, 27 writing performances from 27 students were used as the data base for the study. The data was collected at Akdeniz University in Antalya, and at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, in the winter semester 2015/ 2016. Nine students were chosen from each of the three proficiency levels (A2, B1, and B2), to which students had been allocated on the basis of proficiency exams carried out at the universities. All of the 27 students were given the same writing prompt. They were asked to write a letter to a friend about their campus life, advantages and disadvantages of their university and campus, and to give examples from their personal experience as a student. They had to complete the task within a class lasting 45 minutes. The length of the letter was supposed to be between 150 and 200 words. Students were asked to fill in a questionnaire focusing on their educational background. Given that high schools in Turkey differ in the amount of time they devote to English language instruction or content-based instruction in English (Yal 2011), it was deemed necessary to select participants with similar educational backgrounds, particularly with regard to exposure to English. Following the task administration and data collection, student performances were analysed according to the Scope - Substance error taxonomy (Dobrić & Sigott 2014; Lennon 1991). 2.2 The Scope - Substance taxonomy The Scope - Substance error taxonomy was developed in an attempt to increase the reliability of error classifications in learner language corpus annotation. While error annotation in learner corpora was the prime motive for its development, it may also hold potential for pedagogical practice. The taxonomy is a tool for identifying and categorising errors in student writing samples. It is based on the two concepts of Scope and Substance. Scope refers to the amount of linguistic context that is required for an error to become recognisable. Substance, by contrast, refers to the constituent in the writing sample that needs to be changed in order for the error to disappear. Consequently, each error can be categorised in terms of a combination of Scope and Substance. Charting EFL writing development 73 In fact, the idea of characterising errors in terms of the concepts of Scope and Substance was originally proposed by Lennon (1991), as Sigott et al. (2016) point out. Lennon used the terms ‘domain’ and ‘extent’ to denote what Dobrić and Sigott called Scope and Substance. Lennon demonstrates the application of the taxonomy by means of L2 speech data while Dobrić and Sigott applied it to written learner language data. Identifying errors in writing performances involves complex cognitive processing, which is akin to the processing involved in reading in general (e.g. van Dijk & Kintsch 1983). An error is identified when there is incompatibility between a lexical, syntactic or textual unit and its surrounding context. The unit which is incompatible and the context that surrounds it can vary in size. Scope refers to the amount of context that needs to be considered for an error to become recognisable. Substance, by contrast, refers to the unit or units that need to be modified so that the error will disappear. Since text is processed in chunks rather than in a strictly linear word-by-word manner, it makes sense to express the size of Scope and Substance in terms of syntactic units. The current version of the taxonomy uses the units of the grammatical hierarchy and the approach to syntactic description of the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985) for this purpose. The decision to use the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language was made for reasons of practicality but it needs to be pointed out that in principle any model of syntactic analysis could serve as a basis for the taxonomy. It remains yet to be explored how different syntactic models lead to differences in error categorisation by means of the taxonomy. It is also worth pointing out that while the grammar was not intended as a model of language processing by its authors, it is still the most comprehensive description of English grammar that is available. Consequently, any English sentence structure should be describable following its principles although the grammar was not intended as a tool for describing learner language by its authors. The size of Scope and Substance may be WORD, PHRASE, CLAUSE, SENTENCE or TEXT. Combining Scope and Substance in order to describe errors yields the error types listed in Table 1. Table 1: Error types resulting from combinations of levels of Substance and Scope (Sigott et al. 2016: 82) substance WORD - scope WORD substance CLAUSE - scope SENTENCE substance WORD - scope PHRASE substance CLAUSE - scope TEXT substance WORD - scope CLAUSE substance SENTENCE - scope SENTENCE Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 74 substance WORD - scope SENTENCE substance SENTENCE - scope TEXT substance WORD - scope TEXT substance TEXT - scope TEXT substance PHRASE - scope PHRASE substance PUNCTUATION - scope PHRASE substance PHRASE - scope CLAUSE substance PUNCTUATION - scope CLAUSE substance PHRASE - scope SENTENCE substance PUNCTUATION - scope SENTENCE substance PHRASE - scope TEXT substance PUNCTUATION - scope TEXT substance CLAUSE - scope CLAUSE As can be seen, Table 1 includes PUNCTUATION as a separate Substance category because punctuation marks cannot easily be ascribed a syntactic role. Consequently, errors involving punctuation are considered to constitute separate error types. 2.3 Analysis The following examples, collected from the students’ writing performances, are presented to explain how errors were identified and classified. Some examples may have multiple errors, but we will focus on one particular error in each example. (1) After I have my dinner, I do my homework. Then, I am going back to my flat. These sentences are produced in a context in which the student is writing about her/ his routines. Thus, it is obligatory to use simple present tense in the last sentence. The error needs to be rectified by changing the verb phrase “am going” to “go”. Thus, we will eliminate the auxiliary verb “am” and the morpheme “-ing”. However, one has to look beyond the sentence boundary in order to detect the error. Consequently, the error Scope is TEXT while the Substance is PHRASE. (2) Not only you will meet new people but you will also spend good time. In (2), inversion rules are violated in the first clause. The order of “you” and “will” needs to be changed. This implies a change in clause structure. Since Charting EFL writing development 75 one needs to look at the entire sentence for the error to become perceptible, the error Scope will be SENTENCE while the Substance is CLAUSE. (3) In my school, there are very successful musician. In (3), the verb “are” and the singular subject “musician” constitute a violation of subject-verb agreement. Since this becomes perceptible by looking at the clause, the Scope of the error will be said to be CLAUSE. The error can be rectified by pluralizing the word “musician”. As a result, the error Substance will be WORD. (4) So, you can go to the everywhere easily. In the noun phrase underlined in (4), the definite article needs to be eliminated. Although there is yet another error when the Scope is extended to the prepositional phrase, we do not need to look beyond the phrase level to identify this particular error in the noun phrase. It is worth noting here that the description of Scope and Substance refers to the learner language structure, which looks like a noun phrase, and not the authoritative reconstruction “everywhere”, which would be an adverb phrase. So, both Scope and Substance of the error will be PHRASE. It needs to be pointed out that the resulting structure “to everywhere” constitutes an ungrammatical prepositional phrase, in which the prepositional element needs to be removed in order to make it grammatical. This error, too, becomes noticeable when phrase context is available and correcting it involves changing the phrase structure. So for this error, both Scope and Substance will be PHRASE as well. This is also an example of ‘nested error’ (Sigott et al. 2016), or embedded error (Lennon 1991). For this pilot study, both the superordinate error and the embedded error were counted. (5) Furthermore, there are oppurtunities for eating and enjoying with friends. Spelling errors like the one in the word underlined in (5) can be identified within the Scope of WORD. The word “oppurtunities” alone shows the problem. In cases of spelling errors, both Scope and Substance will be WORD. 2.4 Results When errors are described in terms of Scope and Substance, three ways of counting errors are possible: 1. Error count according to error Scope 2. Error count according to error Substance Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 76 3. Error count according to error type, i.e. Scope and Substance combined to identify an instance of error. In the following, results of the error count according to error Scope are presented. The error incidences will be broken down into proficiency levels A2, B1 and B2 and related to three different reference values, which are in bold typeface in Tables 2 to 6:  The total number of errors across all Scope levels (WORD to TEXT) made by a particular proficiency level (Column I).  The total number of errors made in a particular Scope level across all three proficiency levels (Column II).  The total number of words produced by a particular proficiency level (Column III). In addition, results of the error count for error type, i.e. Scope and Substance combined to identify an instance of error, are presented. These counts are only referenced to the total number of words produced in each level (Column III). In Tables 2 to 6, error percentages and error ratios are given for each proficiency level. This makes it possible to follow changes in error incidence across the three proficiency levels. 2.4.1 TEXT Scope Errors For TEXT Scope, student performances show a clear decrease of error incidence as proficiency increases. This can be seen in various ways in Table 2. Table 2: TEXT Scope Errors TEXT SCOPE ERRORS (132/ 628) 21% I II III IV V VI Levels Total Errors Text Errors Total Words Percent Text Errors in Total Errors A1, B1, B2 Percent Text Errors in 132 Ratio Text Errors in Total Words A1, B1, B2 A2 284 68 1380 23.94% 52% 4.93 B1 224 42 1577 18.75% 32% 2.66 B2 120 22 1736 18.33% 17% 1.27 TOTAL 628 132 4693 100 Charting EFL writing development 77 The total number of TEXT Scope errors for all levels is 132 (21% of all errors, namely 628). When we consider the distribution of these 132 errors among the levels, it can be seen that A2 level students made 52 percent (68) of the TEXT Scope errors (Column V). This percentage decreases to 32 percent (42) for B1 and 17 percent (22) for B2 level students. A similar pattern can be seen in Column VI, where the ratio of errors referenced to the total number of words also decreases steadily from 4.93 per cent to 1.27 per cent. This is the more remarkable as both indices decrease even though the total number of words increases with level of proficiency. At first glance, this pattern seems to be contradicted by the data in Column IV, where there is no notable change in the percentages from B1 to B2. Although the total number of errors decreases sharply from B1 to B2, the percentage of TEXT Scope errors remains virtually the same. Overall, however, there is a strong tendency for errors which affect the text as a whole to become rarer as proficiency increases. Remarkably, when error Substance is taken into account as well, the A2 performances show a ratio of 1.45 of TEXT Scope - TEXT Substance errors (where the sentence order needs to be changed) compared to level B1, which shows 0.19 and level B2, where no such errors are found. This would seem to indicate noticeable improvement in textual competence from level A2 to B2. A similar, although slightly weaker, tendency can also be seen in the TEXT Scope -PHRASE Substance category. It seems that phrase errors which impact textual structure decrease as proficiency increases. 2.4.2 SENTENCE Scope Errors The error count for SENTENCE Scope errors shows improvement primarily for students at level B2, as can be seen in Table 3. Columns V and VI show sharp decreases from B1 to B2, and even Column IV shows a decrease of the error percentage from 33 at level B1 to 28 percent at level B2 although the absolute figures for Total Errors drop sharply from 224 to 120. SUBSTANCE in errors of TEXT SCOPE Ratios referenced to Total Words in A2, B1, B2 Levels Text Sentence Clause Phrase Word Punctuation A2 1.45 0.29 0.00 2.25 0.58 0.36 B1 0.19 0.00 0.00 1.52 0.19 0.76 B2 0.00 0.06 0.00 1.09 0.00 0.12 Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 78 Table 3: SENTENCE Scope Errors SENTENCE SCOPE ERRORS (180/ 628) 29% I II III IV V VI Levels Total Errors Sentence Errors Total Words Percent Sentence Errors in Total Errors A1, B1, B2 Percent Sentence Errors in 180 Ratio Sentence Errors in Total Words A1, B1, B2 A2 284 72 1380 25.35% 40% 5.22 B1 224 74 1577 33.04% 41% 4.69 B2 120 34 1736 28.33% 19% 1.96 TOTAL 628 180 4693 100 However, it is important to remember that the sentence structures presented by A2 and B1/ B2 students differ markedly in complexity, which limits the opportunities for errors to occur at level A2. For instance, A2 students have limited opportunity to commit SENTENCE-PUNCTUATION errors, which are a sub-category of Scope SENTENCE, because their performances tend not to contain long and complex sentences. As a result, we cannot find as many punctuation errors at A2 as we do at level B1. This phenomenon may be relevant for other SENTENCE Scope subcategories as well, particularly for SENTENCE-CLAUSE. That is to say, short sentences consisting of single main clauses limit students’ opportunities to commit errors at the sentence level. 2.4.3 CLAUSE Scope Errors Table 4 shows that CLAUSE Scope errors also generally show a decrease as the proficiency level increases. Error incidence decreases even though text length increases across proficiency levels. SUBSTANCE in errors of SENTENCE SCOPE Ratios referenced to Total Words in A2, B1, B2 Levels Text Sentence Clause Phrase Word Punctuation A2 - 0.58 0.22 0.51 1.30 2.61 B1 - 0.25 0.32 0.32 0.57 3.23 B2 - 0.12 0.12 0.00 0.35 1.38 Charting EFL writing development 79 Table 4: CLAUSE Scope Errors CLAUSE SCOPE ERRORS (124/ 628) 20% I II III IV V VI Levels Total Errors Clause Errors Total Words Percent Clause Errors in Total Errors A1, B1, B2 Percent Clause Errors in 124 Ratio Clause Errors in Total Words A1, B1, B2 A2 284 67 1380 23.59% 54% 4.86 B1 224 35 1577 15.63% 28% 2.22 B2 120 22 1736 18.33% 18% 1.27 TOTAL 628 124 4693 100 As can be seen in Column IV, CLAUSE Scope errors make up 23.59 percent of the total number of errors made by A2 level students. For B1 students, the percentage decreases to 15.63, which is in line with expectations. However, the percentage increases to 18.33 at B2 level. Again, this is due to the sharp decrease in the total number of errors from 224 at B1 to 120 at B2. However, with reference to the total number of clause errors as well as with reference to the total number of words in each level, CLAUSE Scope errors decrease from level B1 to B2, as can be seen in columns V and VI. Closer examination of these two columns reveals that B2 students do not improve as remarkably as do B1 students. While the indices drop by approximately half from A2 to B1, the decrease is much less from B1 to B2. Overall, it seems fair to say that B1 students have improved considerably at the clause level while improvement from level B1 to level B2 is less conspicuous. 2.4.4 PHRASE Scope Errors The data in Table 5 present a different picture. Contrary to the previous results, there is no substantial decrease in errors from level A2 to B1 in Columns IV and V. With reference to the total number of errors in each level, PHRASE Scope errors even increase from 21 to 27 percent as proficiency SUBSTANCE in errors of CLAUSE SCOPE Ratios referenced to Total Words in A2, B1, B2 Levels Text Sentence Clause Phrase Word Punctuation A2 - - 1.88 2.25 0.72 0.00 B1 - - 0.51 0.82 0.89 0.00 B2 - - 0.40 0.35 0.46 0.06 Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 80 increases, as can be seen in Column IV. Also, when referenced to the total number of PHRASE Scope errors (156), the error percentages for A2 and B1 are nearly the same (38% and 39%), as Column V shows. Only when referenced to the total number of words in each level is there a moderate decrease from A2 to B1, as Column VI shows. Table 5: PHRASE Scope Errors PHRASE SCOPE ERRORS (156/ 628) 25% I II III IV V VI Levels Total Errors Phrase Errors Total Words Percent Phrase Errors in Total Errors A1, B1, B2 Percent Phrase Errors in 156 Ratio Phrase Errors in Total Words A1, B1, B2 A2 284 60 1380 21.13% 38% 4.35 B1 224 61 1577 27.23% 39% 3.87 B2 120 35 1736 29.17% 22% 2.02 TOTAL 628 156 4693 100 Detailed examination of the writing samples shows that phrase errors occur predominantly because articles are omitted, used incorrectly, or used where they are not required. Other phrase errors are related to morphological deficiencies in verb and noun phrases. While the total number of error decreases steadily from A2 to B2, the percentage of PHRASE Scope errors shows a steady rise, as can be seen in Column IV. This would seem to indicate that PHRASE Scope errors continue to play an important role as proficiency increases. Phrase level phenomena, then, seem to be a worthwhile focus of teaching also at level B2, at least for the sample of students in this study. 2.4.5 WORD Scope Errors Table 6 shows the error count for WORD Scope errors. These errors are spelling errors and make up only 6 percent of the total number of 628 errors. SUBSTANCE in errors of PHRASE SCOPE Ratios referenced to Total Words in A2, B1, B2 Levels Text Sentence Clause Phrase Word Punctuation A2 - - - 0.87 3.41 0.07 B1 - - - 1.27 2.47 0.13 B2 - - - 0.46 1.56 0.00 Charting EFL writing development 81 Table 6: WORD Scope Errors WORD SCOPE ERRORS (36/ 628) 6% I II III IV V VI Levels Total Errors Word Errors Total Words Percent Word Errors in Total Errors A1, B1, B2 Percent Word Errors in 36 Ratio Word Errors in Total Words A1, B1, B2 A2 284 17 1380 5.99% 47% 1.23 B1 224 12 1577 5.36% 33% 0.76 B2 120 7 1736 5.83% 20% 0.40 TOTAL 628 36 4693 100 As can be seen in Column IV, when referenced to the number of errors found at each proficiency level, the contribution of WORD Scope errors remains relatively stable. However, when referenced to the total number of word errors (36), and when referenced to the total number of words in each proficiency level, there is a steady decline of this error type as proficiency increases. This can be seen in Columns V and VI. This indicates that spelling errors become less frequent as proficiency increases, but compared to the overall decrease of error incidence, the decrease of spelling errors is less pronounced. 2.4.6 An Overview of Error Types Diagram 1 shows the distribution of all twenty error types resulting from combinations of Scope and Substance across the three putative proficiency levels. The incidence of different error types broken down by proficiency level is plotted on the y-axis. Those error types which show a pattern of uninterrupted decrease from A2 to B2 are shaded black, whereas those which do not show such a pattern are in different shades of grey, corresponding to the three proficiency levels. While TEXT-SENTENCE, CLAUSE-PUNCTUATION, and PHRASE-PUNCTUATION run counter to the pattern of steady decrease, the error incidences in these categories are SUBSTANCE IN WORD SCOPE ERRORS Ratios referenced to Total Words in A2, B1, B2 Levels Text Sentence Clause Phrase Word Punctuation A2 - - - - 1.23 0.00 B1 - - - - 0.76 0.00 B2 - - - - 0.40 0.00 Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 82 low and are not interpreted here in order to avoid overinterpretation. However, TEXT-PUNCTUATION, SENTENCE-CLAUSE, SENTENCE- PUNCTUATION, CLAUSE-WORD and PHRASE-PHRASE show a pattern in which error incidence increases from A2 to B1 contrary to expectations. This may be due to two reasons, which may, however, interact. On the one hand, students may simply become more error-prone when they move from A2 to B1. On the other hand, moving to a higher level of proficiency brings about a tendency to produce longer, and more complex, structures (e.g. Silva 1993). These, in turn, provide more opportunities for students to make errors. At this stage of the analysis, it is impossible to determine the extent to which either of these two reasons, or a combination of both, is responsible for the pattern of error incidence. Further research is necessary in order to shed light on this. Figure 1: Overview of Error Type Incidence at Levels A2, B1 and B2 Charting EFL writing development 83 3. Conclusion This pilot study has demonstrated the potential of the Scope - Substance taxonomy as a basis for error counts in writing performances. It seems to be a useful tool for research that needs error counts as its basis. A variety of error indices can be derived from the taxonomy depending on the focus of the research. However, while analyzing writing performances in terms of the Scope - Substance taxonomy has proved to be feasible and worthwhile, it has also become clear that the task is far from simple and straightforward and there are issues which need further attention. Above all, detailed guidelines for the application of the taxonomy need to be formulated in order to ensure consistency in error identification both for a single rater and across raters. In particular, the procedure for dealing with unitary constituency (Quirk et al. 1985: 40) needs to be spelt out. This is important because decisions made in this respect necessarily influence any error count in significant ways. In this study, in cases of unitary constituency, the error classification is based on the constituent of the lowest rather than the highest rank in the grammatical hierarchy. For instance, sentences consisting of only one clause were considered to have CLAUSE as the highest possible level and not SENTENCE. Similarly, phrases consisting of only one word were considered to have WORD as the highest possible constituent and not PHRASE. Example (3) is a case in point. In (3), Scope was considered to be CLAUSE because the sentence consists of only one clause. Ultimately, this decision is arbitrary, but care must be taken to abide by it in the application of the taxonomy. In addition, the phenomenon of ‘multi-level errors’ calls for the formulation of more detailed guidelines. These are errors which have different levels of Scope. For instance, an error may be detectable on the basis of CLAUSE Scope but when corrected, may still violate text-level constraints. In this pilot study, errors of this kind were classified in relation to their higher-level Scope, namely TEXT. This regulation will need to be spelt out explicitly for users of the taxonomy in the future. The attempt to use the Scope - Substance taxonomy to create error counts for the purpose of charting EFL writing development has shown that it seems simplistic to expect that the development of writing competence will be mirrored by a steady decrease of all error types. Instead, the analyses have shown that although overall, the incidence of errors decreases as proficiency increases, only ten of the error types show such a steady decrease. While four error types show no or negligible error incidences, six error types run counter to this pattern, indicating that an increase in error incidence in a particular error type does not necessarily mean lower proficiency overall. The causes of these unsteady patterns of error incidence may be inherent in learner development. However, they are probably also Buket Bıdık and Guenther Sigott 84 the consequence of the Scope - Substance error taxonomy being focused on errors exclusively without taking into account changes in the opportunities for learners to make errors due to the developing structural complexity of their writing. Further research is needed to reveal the causes of these unsteady patterns of error incidence in detail. It needs to be pointed out that the results reported here and the conclusions drawn from them are necessarily tentative. This is due to the fact that students were allocated to the three proficiency levels by their university language departments. Details of this procedure are not known to the authors and hence the validity of the students’ allocation to the CEFR levels has to be taken on trust. References Dobrić, Nikola & Guenther Sigott. 2014. Towards an error taxonomy for student writing. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 19 (2): 111-118. Lennon, Paul. 1991. Error: Some problems of definition, identification and distinction. Applied Linguistics 12: 180-196. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Sigott, Guenther, Hermann Cesnik & Nikola Dobrić. 2016. Refining the Scope - Substance error taxonomy: a closer look at Substance. In Nikola Dobrić, Eva-Maria Graf & Alexander Onysko (eds.), Corpora in Applied Linguistics - Current Approaches, 79-94. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Silva, Tony. 1993. Toward an understanding of the distinct nature of L2 writing: the ESL research and its implications. TESOL Quarterly 27 (4): 657-677. Van Dijk, Teun A. & Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press. Yal, Lauren. 2011. Teaching English as a foreign language in Turkey: a complete guide. Online. San Fransisco State University. http: / / laurenyal.myefolio com/ Uploads/ Teaching%20EFL%20in%20Turkey.pdf (accessed 04.02.2016). Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić The cognitive translation hypothesis and translating proverbs - a case study of English and Serbian The cognitive translation hypothesis Abstract Among the many ways of achieving denotative, connotative, pragmatic, and aesthetic equivalences when translating proverbs, one can be to observe their conceptual structure, where applicable. Identification of the mapping domain(s) in proverbs conceptualized and lexicalized as metaphors or metonymies can lead us towards the discovery or construction of most natural equivalences. The first part of the paper outlines the cognitive translation hypothesis (Mandelblit 1995; Al-Hasnawi 2007; Dobrić 2011) and its use in translating metaphors and metonymies in general. The second part exemplifies the application of the model to proverbs translated from English into Serbian. It is shown that the model is useful in achieving high levels of natural equivalence. 1. Introduction and background Following the cognitive translation hypothesis (Mandelblit 1995; Al- Hasnawi 2007; Dobrić 2011) three schemes can be proposed that describe the cognitive mapping relevant to metaphor/ metonymy translation, and by extension proverbs appearing as metaphors or metonymies. They are as follows: 1) Same Mapping Structure (SMS); 2) Comparable Mapping Structure (CMS); and 3) Different Mapping Structure (DMS). The mapping structure here relates to the standard conceptual metaphor theory and the idea that metaphors and metonymies are constructed out of patterns that transcend the individual lexical item. Metaphors take the form of an alignment of two conceptual domains, of semantic and cognitive aspects that are mapped from a source to a target domain (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993; Ortony 1993; Steen 1999; Kövecses 2002; Evans 2004; Kövecses 2005; Gibbs 2006; Glucksberg 2008; Glucksberg & Haught 2006; Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić 86 Gibbs 2008). For example, the LOVE IS WAR conceptual mapping is easily recognizable in its lexicalized forms in expressions such as ‘He is slowly gaining ground with her’, ‘She pursued him relentlessly’, ‘He won her hand’ or ‘He is known for his many rapid conquests’ and both domains (WAR as a source and LOVE as the target) are easily recognizable in most of their meaningful aspects. Metonymies, akin to metaphors, also involve conceptual mapping, with the difference that the mapping happens within one domain in metonymy. This process of conceptual shift within one domain most commonly involves a shift in terms of Specific is Generic or Generic is Specific (Ruiz de Mendoza 1999; Kövecses & Radden 1999; Panther & Thornburg 2003). For instance, the metonymy EAR IS LISTENING, involving the extension of the ear to what it actually does (and even beyond to comprehension and attention) can be seen in a metonymic expression ‘Lend me your ear’. When applied to translation, the Same Mapping Structure group then encompasses metaphors and metonymies in two different languages (source SL and target TL) which have the same conceptual makeup and which are also lexicalized (worded) in the same manner. Comparable Mapping Structure refers to metaphors and metonymies in the SL and TL which have the same conceptual content but differ in their lexicalization. In both of these cases, the semantic content of the proverbs is the same. The last Different Mapping Structure group encompasses metaphors and metonymies in the SL which cannot be matched to either a lexical or a conceptual equivalent in the TL but only have a denotative match with the same semantic content. Having in mind that metaphors and metonymies are the most common forms in which proverbs appear (Moreno 2005), it seems reasonable to propose the application of the same translation model to proverbs. Despite the cultural differences, proverbs can be seen as sharing schemata (Mieder 1993; Wyzkiewizc 1998; Honeck & Welge 1997). What varies across cultures are scripts, the view of reality, and categories, but not the way we categorize, or the way we think or structure concepts in our minds (Moreno & Pastor 2004: 45). Hence, regardless of whether we have one or two domains involved in the conceptualization, the three mapping structures/ schemes of SMS, CMS, and DMS can still apply when it comes to the translation of proverbs. 2. Translating proverbs The practical application of the cognitive translation hypothesis involves several steps, which require a combination of metaphor/ metonymy identification procedures (Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) - Steen 1999; Pragglejaz Group 2007; Steen 2007) and standard translation The cognitive translation hypothesis 87 procedures of establishing equivalences (Koller 2011). Starting with a proverb in the source language, Step 1 involves considering the lexical form of the proverb in terms of its contextual readings and deciding on whether it represents a metaphor or a metonymy (or a combination of both (Moreno 2004: 52). Step 2 of the analysis involves the identification of the conceptual mapping pattern. Having completed the conceptual part of the analysis in the source language in these two steps, Step 3 is the search for a semantic, cognitive, and possibly a lexical equivalent of the mapping pattern in the target language. The most ideal case is to find an SMS equivalent which would cover denotative and both pragmatic and aesthetic demands of a translation. The second-best scenario is to locate a CMS equivalent in the TL, which would satisfy denotative equivalence needs and also preserve the pragmatic equivalence (by preserving the same conceptualization). The last possibility is of course the DMS in which case the translator would have to settle for denotative equivalence alone. Figure 1 exemplifies the steps. Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić Figure 1: A simplified outline of the cognitive translation procedure when applied to proverbs. source language proverb Barking dogs seldom bite. EMPTY THREATS ARE BARKING DOGS (THAT SELDOM BITE) Step 1: metaphor/ metonymy METAPHOR VEHICLE-----TARGET METONYMY VEHICLE---VEHICLE+ Step 2: conceptual analysis VEHICLE EMPTY THREATS TARGET BARKING DOGS (THAT SELDOM BITE) Step 3: transl. equival. Pas koji laje ne ujeda. A dog that barks does not bite. VEHICLE EMPTY THREATS TARGET BARKING DOGS (THAT SELDOM BITE) EMPTY THREATS ARE BARKING DOGS (THAT SELDOM BITE) METAPHOR VEHICLE------TARGET METONYMY VEHICLE---VEHICLE+ target language proverb SMS Same Mapping Structure 88 The cognitive translation hypothesis 89 3. Examples This part of the paper will demonstrate the practical application of the cognitive translation model we outlined previously to proverbs by exemplifying their translation from English (SL) into Serbian (TL). The three steps of the procedure (identification of metaphor/ metonymy in a source language proverb > identification of the conceptual mapping in the attested source metaphor/ metonymy form of the proverb > search for highest type of equivalence in the target language) and their combination with the three types of cognitive translation equivalence (Same Mapping Structure (SMS), Comparable Mapping Structure (CMS), and Different Mapping Structure (DMS)) are exemplified by 30 proverbs translated from English into Serbian (Karadžić 1969; Wilson 1970; Vuković 1972; Mikić & Škara 1992; Flavell & Flavell 1993; Obiakor 2008). 1 3.1 Same mapping structure These proverbs have the same conceptual structure (either metaphor or metonymy) and the same lexicalization pattern in the SL and the TL. They are arguably the least time consuming to translate and constitute highest levels of natural equivalence. 2  E: All that glitters is not gold. S: Nije zlato sve što sija.  E: He who digs a pit for others, falls in himself. S: Ko drugom jamu kopa, sam u nju upada.  E: All roads lead to Rome. S: Svi putevi vode u Rim.  E: Clothes don’t make a man. S: Odelo ne čini čoveka.  E: Can’t see the forest for the trees. S: Ne vidi šumu od drveća.  E: Finding a needle in a haystack. S: Naći iglu u plastu sena.  E: The forbidden fruit is the sweetest. S: Zabranjeno voće je najslađe.  E: Where there is smoke there is fire. S: Nema vatre bez dima. 1 We decided to exemplify the translational models with 10 examples for each, while many more could of course be found. 2 When listing examples, E stands for English (as a source language) and S for Serbian (as the target language). Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić 90  E: The end justifies the means. S: Cilj opravdava sredstva.  E. Man is the measure of all things. S: Čovek je mera svih stvari. 3.2 Comparable mapping structure This category includes proverbs which share the same conceptual structure in both the SL and the TL (being metaphors or metonymies), but differ in terms of their lexicalizations.  E: Out of sight, out of mind. S: Daleko od očiju, daleko od srca. Far away from the eyes, far away from the heart. 3  E: Birds of a feather flock together. S: Svaka ptica svome jatu leti. Every bird flies to its own flock.  E: A lie has no legs. S: U laži su kratke noge. Lies have short legs.  E: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. S: Bolje sprečiti nego lečiti Better to prevent than to cure.  E: Don’t buy a pig in a poke. S: Ne kupuj mačku u vreći. Don’t buy a cat in a sack/ poke.  E: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. S: Poklonjenom konju se ne gleda u zube. Don’t look a gift horse in the teeth.  E: One swallow doesn't make a summer. S: Jedna lasta ne cini proleće. One swallow doesn’t make a spring.  E: Still waters run deep. S: Tiha voda breg roni. Still water floods the hill.  E: The pot calls the kettle black. S: Rugala se šerpa loncu, široka mu usta. The pot mocked the pan, its mouth is wide. 3 The Serbian examples in sections 3.2 and 3.3 are provided with a direct translation as well in order to illustrate better their differences in terms of lexicalization and/ or conceptualization from the source proverb in English. The cognitive translation hypothesis 91  E: When the cat’s away the mice will play. S: Kad mačke nema, miševi kolo vode. When the cat is away, the mice lead the dance. 3.3 Different mapping structure The third model encompasses proverbs that have neither conceptual nor lexical correspondents in the TL. Establishing equivalence involves weighing the contextual reading of the proverb in the SL and then finding an appropriate semantic (denotative) equivalent in the TL.  E: Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. S: Nemoj praviti od komarca magarca. Don’t make a donkey out of a mosquito. or Nemoj praviti od muve slona. Don’t make an elephant out of a fly.  E: The early bird catches the worm. S: Ko rano rani, dve sreće grabi The one who wakes up early, gets to have two fortunes.  E: Too many cooks spoil the broth. S: Gde je mnogo babica, kilava su deca. Where there are many midwives, the children are lazy.  E: A leopard cannot change its spots. S: Vuk dlaku menja ćud nikada. A wolf does change his hair, but never his character.  E: A thief doesn't steal from another thief. S: Vrana vrani oči ne vadi. A crow doesn’t pick out the other crow’s eyes.  E: Fight fire with fire. S: Klin se klinom izbija. Put out a wedge with another wedge.  E: It was the last straw that broke the camel's back. S: Kap koja je prelila čašu. The drop that made the glass flow over.  E: To turn the other cheek. S: Ko tebe kamenom, ti njega hlebom. Whoever throws a stone at you; you throw bread at him.  E: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. S: Ruka ruku mije. One hand caresses the other.  E: When pigs fly. S: Kad na vrbi rodi grožđe When a willow tree bears grapes. Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić 92 4. Discussion The previous section demonstrated the usefulness of applying the cognitive translation hypothesis to translating proverbs. Considering the conceptual mappings involved in (many) proverbs conceptualized and lexicalized as metaphors or metonymies can help translators to achieve high levels of equivalence. The methodology not only helps in establishing equivalences but also makes the process of translating proverbs much faster. A translator is guided by the conceptualization of a target proverb in search for a translational equivalent, rather than by its lexicalization alone. And finally, even in cases where there are no equivalences to be found, of either the Same Mapping Structure or Comparable Mapping Structure or Different Mapping Structure, being guided by the conceptual structure of a proverb can still help significantly in translating it. For example, an English proverb ‘When ale is in, wit is out.’ does not really have an equivalent of any kind in Serbian. Knowing that it represents a mapping of STUPID IS DRUNK domains may help in, for example, either paraphrasing the proverb as ‘nisu govorili razumno jer su bili pijani’ (‘they made no sense because they were drunk’) or perhaps even creatively constructing a novel proverbial expression ‘Kad piće stigne, razum ode kući’ (‘When the drinks arrive, reason goes home’). All in all, the practical application of the model in everyday translation is highly advisable because it makes the process itself much easier and facilitates the achievement of high levels of translation equivalence. References Al-Hasnawi, Ali. 2007. A cognitive approach to translating metaphors. Translation Journal 11 (3) [accessed online at http: / / translationjournal.net/ journal/ 41metaphor.htm] Dobrić, Nikola. 2011. The cognitive approach to translating metaphors revisited - the case of pure, clear and clean vs. čist and jasan. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 36 (2): 99-117. Evans, Vyvyan. 2004. The Structure of Time. Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gibbs, Raymond. 2006. Metaphor in cognitive linguistics: past questions and future challenges. Revista de Documentacao de Estudos em Linguistica Teorica e Aplicada (DELTA) 22: 1-20. Gibbs, Raymond. 2008. Image schemas in conceptual development: What happened to the body? Philosophical Psychology 21: 231-239. Glucksberg, Sam & Catrinel Haught. 2006. On the relation between metaphor and simile: when comparison fails. Mind and Language 21 (3): 360-378. The cognitive translation hypothesis 93 Glucksberg, Sam. 2008. How metaphors create categories - Quickly. In Raymond Gibbs (ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 67-83. New York: Cambridge University Press. Honeck, Richard & Jeffrey Welge. 1997. Creation of proverbial wisdom in the laboratory. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26 (6): 695-629. Koller, Werner. 2011. Einführung in die Übersetzungswissenschaft. Tübingen: Francke. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán & Günther Radden. 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In: Klaus- Uwe Panther & Günther Radden (eds.), Metonymy in Language and Thought, 17-60. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lakoff, George. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 202-251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Mandelblit, Nili. 1995. The cognitive view of metaphor and its implications for translation theory. Translation and Meaning 3: 483-495. Mieder, Wolfgang. 1993. Proverbs Are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Moreno, Ana Ibáñez & Ana Ortigosa Pastor. 2004. A contrastive discourse analysis of proverbs in English and Spanish: the discovery of how much can be communicated through so little. In JoDee Anderson, J.M. Oro Cabanas & Jesús Varela Zapata (eds.), Linguistic Perspectives from the Classroom, 357-371. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Moreno, Ana Ibáñez. 2005. An analysis of the cognitive dimension of proverbs in English and Spanish: the conceptual power of language reflecting popular beliefs. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2 (1): 42-54. Ortony, Andrew. 1993. The role of similarity in similes and metaphors. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 342-256. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panther, Klaus-Uwe & Linda Thornburg (eds.). 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1-39. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José. 1999. Introducción a la teoría cognitiva de la metonimia. Granada: Método Ediciones. Steen, Gerard. 1999. From linguistic to conceptual metaphor in five steps. In Raymond Gibbs & Gerard Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 57-77. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Steen, Gerard. 2007. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wyżkiewizc, Regina. 1998. Representation of the home/ house in Polish and Serbian proverbs. In Peter Ďurčo (ed.), Europhras ’97: Phraseology and Paremiology, 366-369. Bratislava: Akadémia PZ. Nikola Dobrić and Ivana Cvekić 94 Sources Flavell, Linda & Roger Flavell. 1993. Dictionary of Proverbs and their Origins. London: Kyle Cathie. Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. 1969. Srpske narodne poslovice i druge različne kao i one u običaj uzete riječi. Beograd: Nolit. Mikić, Pavao, Danica Škara. 1992. Kontrastivni riječnik poslovica. Zagreb: August Cesarec. Obiakor, Festus E. 2008. 100 Multicultural Proverbs. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press. Vuković, Milan T. 1972. Narodni običaji verovanja i poslovice kod srba. Beograd: Prosveta. Wilson, F.P. 1970. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dušan Gabrovšek Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 1 1. Introduction The present paper is programmatic; it focuses on "experiential" extended collocations that are a significant and real, if relatively unclear and also neglected part of phraseology in English. They can be termed experiential in the sense of showing empirical salience, or extralinguistic/ encyclopedic relevance, mirroring as they do part-universal, part-specific human experience, illustrating the phenomenon of recurrent real-world extended collocational embeddedness 2 that can easily transcend monolingual linguistic borders. Second, they are extended in the sense that the prototypical binary collocation exists in a form augmented by at least one lexical (collocational) or grammatical (colligational) element, as e.g. in to impose a deadline → to impose a tight deadline or to clear the way →to clear the way for (sth). The two can often act in combination, as in to become/ remain heavily reliant on (sth/ sb). Overall, such formations are, admittedly, rather vague and intuitive, existing more or less on a cline where full phraseological salience and no added phraseological salience are the two end-points. Furthermore, they can be unpredictably language-specific or not, and are more often than not ignored in most dictionaries, whether monolingual or bilingual, or at best treated haphazardly. Yet, they should primarily be shown - selectively, to be sure - as preferably highlighted (parts of) examples of use or even as multiword (=phraseological) items in their own right that are to be listed as such, first and foremost in advanced learners’ English dictionaries and in generalpurpose bilingual dictionaries with English as an L2 that cater also to encoding needs. There is a desideratum that once the advanced learners’ 1 Part of the paper is based on the presentation entitled ("Experiential") Extended Collocations in EFL, delivered at the Alpen Adria Anglistics Conference: Crossing Borders and Challenging Boundaries - Anglistics Studies in the Alps-Adriatic, Klagenfurt, Austria, 25 - 27 September 2015. 2 Experiential phraseology is not a common topic; however, it has been brought up in at least two lines of research: Benson et al. (1986: 258 - 261) and Ding (2009). I have addressed it in Gabrovšek (2012). Dušan Gabrovšek 96 dictionaries have improved their treatment of extended collocations, general-purpose encoding-oriented bilingual dictionaries should follow suit; in this context, each dictionary should base its selection of extended collocations to be included largely on specific contrastive considerations. The paper provides a concise account of this particular type of collocations and argues for giving them their due, contrasting them with the corresponding binary collocations and examining their treatment in selected English dictionaries. The focus is on a few headnouns including deadline and goal, and on one adjectival collocator, viz. key. 2. Extended units of meaning at large It was John Sinclair (1991: 110-111, 1996) who introduced the influential concept of the coselection principle. This is usually contrasted with the timehonored open-choice (=grammar-based) principle of language generation, according to which language users have available to them a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that represent single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments. 3 Moreover, Sinclair argued convincingly for recognizing also a variety of what he labeled extended units of meaning, his oft-cited classic examples including of course, (barely) visible to/ with the naked eye and out of the corner of one's eye. 4 Let us note at the outset that even though they are not relevant to the issues dealt with in this paper, there are in English a number of what seem to be - at first sight at any rate - extended units (including both idiom-type and collocation-type) that turn out to be themselves basic, to be processed as single choices, as their seeming semantically related prototypical binary forms do not even exist: for example, contrary to popular opinion, to cut corners on sth, to fall on deaf ears, to give sb a clean bill of health, to have a short temper, to have a sixth sense for sth, to keep a straight face, the next best thing, on second thoughts, to set/ lay eyes on sb/ sth, and something funny going on. Such items are characteristically but not exclusively idioms rather than collocations. Secondly, and in a similar vein, extended units include idioms and patterns, as in to mutter under one’s breath and to lend [somebody] a sympathetic ear (idioms extended by single-word items), to keep a sharp lookout for [+noun], to stand a chance + of + -ing verb, or 3 Moreover, it is a commonplace today to observe that “Meaning arises from words in particular combinations” (Sinclair 2004: 148) - that is, meanings are located in sequences of words and not in the individual words making up these sequences (Pearce 2014: 25). In a similar vein, “It is by now well known that for the most part meaning belongs to multi-word units rather than to individual words.” (Danielsson 2007: 17) 4 Since this paper focuses on extended collocations, it avoids the conceptually conceived issue of the phraseological status of collocations vs. the far more heterogeneous extended units of meaning, merely observing that the two go a long way toward illustrating the functioning of the coselection principle. Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 97 to be + common knowledge + that-clause (patterns). These too fall outside the scope of this paper while eloquently testifying to both the complexity of the very notion of extension in syntagmatic terms and the different ways of the functioning of the coselection principle. Extended units of meaning, then, can be formed in a great variety of ways, involving not only collocations and colligations but phrasal verbs, link(ing) verbs, compounds, and (parts of) idioms. They vary in complexity, “tightness,” stability, and overall phraseological relevance. Furthermore, the “buildup” process observed in their formation may easily comprise more than two stages: A frequent collocate of gamut is whole, and the two are often used in the “extended phrase” to run the whole gamut (Pearce 2007: 37). Likewise, the noun look forms the collocation take a look that can be expanded into take a fresh/ quick look and further on into take a long hard look, often with a colligational element following (at somebody/ something). Consider also e.g. faith → good faith → in good faith → to act in good faith and the related [something] is declared as a sign/ gesture/ show of good faith, and so on. A motley crew if ever there was one. To get us going, and in a far more restricted - and far more manageable! - mode at that, here is a list of real-language extended collocations that I gathered when skimming through a selection of articles published in The New York Times online in late 2015: to agree to the largest regional trade accord in history to approve a temporary spending measure to avert a shutdown (Breaking News, 30 Sept. 2015) a case would inflict long-term damage on a company to clear another hurdle to bailout talks [of a country] to clear the way for renewed peace talks [of a cease-fire] to deal a crippling blow to someone to declare a public-health emergency to deliver customized outfits drug shortages force hard decisions on rationing (title) to engage in + adjective + combat to face a court-martial for desertion to face growing public anger to feel a grudging respect for somebody’s talent to force policy changes on the Obama administration to gravely damage the carmaker’s reputation to lead the loud and fast British rock band Motörhead a longstanding dispute over something to make an effort / no + adjective/ adverb + effort (adj/ adv is frequent but not obligatory) to make a landmark commitment to start a national program to open criminal proceedings against someone part of an effort to quash the nascent feminist movement Dušan Gabrovšek 98 a precinct plagued by entrenched violence to produce quirky feature articles to reach a landmark deal on something to suffer a legal setback to unequivocally reject the allegations + that-clause. These strings - and a plethora of others - go a long way toward suggesting that collocations need to be looked at in a more varied and wider framework, specifically also in a way that transcends the largely unquestioned prototypical binary restriction 5 - even if one acknowledges that in many cases, the binary combination is the basic one, the prototypical one, the most frequent one. For example, what are we to do when a look at something becomes an inside look at something? Ignore the latter? And if somebody has to face charges that are state criminal charges, is the latter really but a grammar-based appendage? Next, it is usually important to learn who won a certain prize, so that the sequence of to confer a prize on somebody is - can well be - more than a mere grammar-based extension of to confer a prize. Also, one can decide not only to convene a meeting but to convene an emergency meeting to decide whether ... . Finally and more specifically, in the game of football (I mean soccer), to score a goal is clearly basic, what the game’s all about - but what about recognizing, say, to score an away goal and to give away a soft goal? 3. Extended collocations and their salience It seems almost unnecessary today to define collocation: It is a “loosely” fixed 6 (=fixed to a degree), semantically transparent (=compositional) and recurrent string, a syntagmatic phenomenon that usually holds phraseological salience even if it is not really a phraseological unit to be entered and defined in dictionaries separately. 7 What is frequently singled out in describing collocations is their unpredictability stemming from their combinability restrictions that differ from language to language. 5 Where, moreover, the two structural types of adjective + noun and verb + noun object are often favored. 6 The seemingly illogical - but in actual fact apt - expression loosely fixed appears to have been first used by American linguist Morton Benson: “Between idioms, on one hand [sic], and free combinations, on the other, are loosely fixed combinations of the type to commit murder (Benson et al. 1986: 253). 7 While the basic features of collocations are their fairly (“loosely”) fixed structure and semantic transparency, the properties of collocations most frequently adduced also include frequency of co-occurrence, arbitrariness or unpredictability, naturalness, and language-specificity. Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 99 Collocations are typically (shown as being) binary; thus e.g. the pioneering 8 BBI Combinatory Dictionary (Benson et al. 2009: xi), which identifies and describes (pp. xix - xxix) eight major structural types of grammatical collocations and seven major structural types of lexical collocations, lists predominantly examples - some 25 of them - of binary collocations added to the newly revised edition of the widely acclaimed pioneering work: to access data, a borderline case, cultural diversity, to downsize the workforce, legally binding, a security camera, to wave goodbye etc. 9 Moreover, a look at textbooks and learners’ dictionaries of English largely supports the view that collocations, while being clearly significant, are a more or less binary affair, as observed in heavy defeat, to launch an attack, readily available, scheduled flight, vaguely familiar, etc. This is implied also in the introductions to the four standard dictionaries of English collocations, namely the BBI (Benson et al. 2009) just referred to, Oxford Collocations (McIntosh 2009: v), Macmillan Collocations (Rundell 2010: vii), and Longman Collocations (Mayor 2013: vi): strong wind, heavy rain, to conduct a survey, rapturous applause, high winds, to make/ take/ reach a decision, perfectly/ patently/ glaringly obvious... But is this necessarily the only way we actually experience them, say when reading? How do we process collocations of varying length and complexity, say to work to a tight deadline or (to use a fairly recent New York Times example) to confront a fierce protest over a second straight year of all-white Oscar acting nominations? What about His face broke into a wide grin? And how about making a statement vs. making a sweeping statement on/ about sth? 10 To make a change vs. to make a welcome change? To be always invariably dissected along binary lines - and why exactly? If anything, this appears to be an overly restricted view. Extended collocations can be defined as sequences that contain a binary collocation (in this paper chiefly v + n object) extended by at least one element or “addition.” Additions are either collocational (=lexical [here adjective]) or colligational (=grammatical [here preposition(al phrase) or a construction]), or indeed both at the same time, as in to receive a free subscription to (a journal). Such units for the most part retain (part of) the phraseological-collocational relevance (as indicated by frequency, 8 First published in 1986. 9 Admittedly, the dictionary includes to level an accusation at and to put a spin on sth, both of which are basic rather than being extended, the “added” colligational at and on being almost obligatory. 10 Semantic differences involved in extended collocations in comparison with the basic ones may be both profound and subtle: Thus to make a sweeping statement adds an element of negative semantic prosody - given that sweeping statement/ generalization, a “second-level” extension of the binary non-prosodic to make a statement, is “used to show disapproval” (Fox and Combley 2014: 1855). Dušan Gabrovšek 100 substitutability, and semantic transparency) observed in the binary strings; however, they are typically less frequent than their binary forms: under sedation (COCA: 25 hits), under heavy sedation (COCA: 4 hits), under strong sedation (COCA: Ø hits). Does this mean that the extended structure is merely - can only be? - a ”phrase” showing the context illustrating a characteristic use of under sedation? The answer must be no - not always at any rate. Here are a few examples, again sampled effortlessly from The New York Times: to make an informed choice to impose sanctions on a country to make a sweeping statement on/ about sth to receive wide media coverage to take a deep/ long/ big breath to bear a close resemblance to sb/ sth to pass a sweeping health-care reform bill to be/ appear deeply divided on something. The above examples suggest that extended collocations can and do differ in length. Still, most of them will consist of three or four components, i.e. the prototypical binary collocation extended by one or two constituents, whether collocational, colligational, or both. Though far less common, longer sequences are not out of the question; if they are included (thanks to being recurrent and salient as unit-like sequences), they are likely to illustrate primarily recurrent syntactic strings rather than phraseology, with the proviso that the dividing line between the two cannot be stated with precision; on the contrary, there is a cline, with the binary collocation and the lengthy extended collocation being merely the two end-points. Extended collocations are a neglected but very real type of phraseology in today's English. They can be labeled experiential if they are particularly salient - and thus recurrent - due to their being reflections (whether or not culture-specific) of speakers' major concerns, ideas, actions, states, likes and dislikes, and experiences. They are extended if they are augmented from the basic binary type by at least another lexical or grammatical element, thus comprising each three or more constituents, as in to break a code → to break a secret code, a special deal → to negotiate a special deal, or to make a guess → to make a good guess at something. Examples are easy to find: to issue a joint statement, to make an informed guess, to bear a close resemblance to, to impose sanctions on (a country), to make an official statement about/ on sth, to offer a cut- Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 101 price deal on (many flights), to invest heavily in (a business), to work to a tight deadline, the more specialized to plead guilty to a charge, etc. Extended collocability is a phenomenon that has not really been given its due; however, there are a few notable exceptions including collocational cascades, defined as “sequences of interlocking items,” where collocational patterns extend from a base to a collocator and on again to another base, creating “chains of shared collocates” (Gledhill 2000: 212). Similarly, the concept of extended lexicogrammatical patterns (Gledhill 2011: 5) is relevant too. In a more restricted context, Blass (2012) has argued, in a study of the complex preposition by way of, that extended lexical units can frequently perform discourse-structuring functions. Structurally, extended collocations may take a variety of forms over and above the prototypical binary verb + noun lexical collocation augmented by another lexical element, typically an adjective, such as to give a cry → to give a sharp cry or to take a breath → to take a deep/ long/ big breath. The above examples from The New York Times go some way toward illustrating the variety involved. Extension may involve both collocational and colligational elements, as in give one’s approval → give one’s approval to something, or rampage → on the rampage → to go on the rampage, where the noun is only used with on the, with go being frequent but not indispensable. The binary sequence is extended mostly for semantic/ pragmatic reasons, as in have/ keep a grip → have/ keep a tight/ strong/ firm/ iron grip (on something), or to make a guess → to make an informed/ educated guess. 11 Extended collocations are but a reflection of the way we communicate: the basic idea is made more complex and is therefore augmented by at least one “loosely” fixed component; thus if an athlete endures a slump that is long, they endure a prolonged slump. Case closed. Drawing primarily on the five leading advanced learners' English dictionaries, especially Longman Dictionary (Fox and Combley 2014), as well as on textual evidence, the paper focuses largely on those extended collocational strings where the prototypical binary collocation of the verb + noun object type is extended by adjectives and/ or prepositions, prepositional phrases, or structures e.g. to make a statement → to make a sweeping statement → to make a sweeping statement on/ about sth or to reach/ strike a deal → to reach/ strike a financial/ political/ preliminary deal. 12 Such strings, too, 11 However, informed guess and educated guess can be said to differ in that the former is fully collocational, informed being used in this sense (‘based on knowledge’) also e.g. in informed choice and informed judgment and thus representing but a discrete sense of informed; on the other hand, educated guess is more idiom-/ compound-like, educated having this sense only in educated guess. 12 “Adding” adjectives is not always an option as it appears to follow the logic of idiomaticity. Thus some items resist adjectival expansions, witness e.g. move (n) as used in a move in the right direction, to make no move + to-infinitive, to make a move (toward the Dušan Gabrovšek 102 illustrate aptly one of the diverse - but largely underrated - ways in which Sinclair's (1991) ground-breaking coselection principle operates in English. However, overall, learner lexicography and advanced EFL teaching alike have paid little attention to the phenomenon, following a long and powerful tradition of favoring, in illustrating structuring in language, syntactic phrases, clauses and sentences, and lately also binary collocations, often at the expense of extended strings. Importantly, extended collocations can differ a lot in their phraseological salience, depending largely on predictability, or “tightness” of the complex sequence that derives from its extralinguistic salience: The more they are predictable, the weaker they are in phraseological terms. 13 Thus e.g. extending to take a break into to take a ten-minute break, or to write an introduction into to write a new introduction shows little in terms of phraseological salience to be observed in the extended collocation. 14 By contrast, extending to give a statement into to give a false statement creates a phraseologically significant longer sequence, in terms of both substitutability and extralinguistic relevance. The same is true (but with both collocational and colligational additions), of, say, to develop new security measures + toinfinitival clause. Moreover, extended collocations can be both semantically and frequentially quite close to the basic binary ones, for instance when being used only to add more emphasis, as in with abandon vs. with wild/ reckless abandon, 15 to be in need vs. to be in urgent/ desperate need, or in an embarrassing decision vs. an acutely embarrassing decision. The main reasons for highlighting extended collocations are their extralinguistic salience and their ensuing phraseological significance, as e.g. in to score an unfortunate own goal listed in two collocation dictionaries below. However, even if recognized and listed, such sequences tend to be included as mere grammar-based examples illustrating contextualized binary collocations, which downplays their syntagmatic relevance. Anyway, in an interlingual framework, the basic contrastive considerations (semantic door), and a move away from (sth). Moreover, some binary adj + n collocations seem to resist any “additions”, witness e.g. Longman’s One false move and I’ll shoot. Another binary - but this time colligational - example shown is Much more research is being done, which is a move in the right direction. (Fox and Combley 2014: 1195) 13 Again, overall length is a factor too: The longer the sequence, the weaker it is likely to be in phraseological terms. 14 Note that e.g. to take a career break is not to be considered an extended collocation unless one regards career break as being itself a lexical collocation rather than a compound. 15 Thus the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) shows 9 hits for with abandon, 7 for with reckless abandon, and 6 for with wild abandon. The 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) does not yield such a balanced picture, containing 211 hits for with abandon, 41 for with reckless abandon, and 16 for with wild abandon. There is, then, a preference for the binary form with abandon - in American English that is not shared by British English. Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 103 [un]predictability, structural [non]congruence, and dissimilar "experiential" salience) are at least relevant as well (in fact they are often given precedence), frequently providing valid selection criteria for (not) incorporating them in bilingual dictionaries, primarily those designed also for encoding tasks. 4. Dictionaries 1: General-purpose advanced learners’ English crop THE single general-purpose reference source that is likely to offer a comprehensive corpus-based listing of English collocations - many in the form of (parts of) (preferably highlighted) examples of use - for the benefit of advanced learners of English 16 is the advanced learners’ English dictionary; evidently, bilingual dictionaries should follow suit, not forgetting their specific contrastive considerations. What one finds in English learners’ dictionaries, however, is a patchy, inconsistent and unsystematic treatment of extended collocations. The main reason for this may be the powerful traditional preference for sentence-length examples and phrases, plus lately for binary collocations. Thus e.g. the latest Longman (Fox and Combley 2014) is at pains to show and highlight (by means of bold type) binary collocations such as to take out / renew / cancel a subscription; to impose / lift sanctions, trade sanctions, economic sanctions. Showing, for instance, to impose tight economic sanctions on (a country) as a single sequence appears not to have been an option to consider for inclusion. Next, whereas its entry on heavy, sense 3, does offer the example of my son does most of the heavy outdoor work, it signals collocational salience only in binary terms (heavy work) and not in the extended sequence to do heavy outdoor work. The sedation entry includes the collocation under sedation followed by the “binary-bias-type” sentencelength example of the patient was still under heavy sedation (cf. to be under heavy sedation) (ibid., p. 1640). Moreover, instances of inconsistent treatment are there as well: have a narrow lead is shown in bold whereas have a commanding lead is not in bold type. What about the other leading advanced learners’ English dictionaries? Let us, for instance, look at their treatment 17 of the adjective key, primarily in terms of (not) showing extended sequences such as the collocation-cumcolligation-type make a key decision on sth: (1) Longman offers the following examples listed s.v. key (adj) (ibid., p. 1000): China’s support is key to the success of the coalition. │key factor / points / 16 This is also the kind of reference work they are likely to be familar with and to consult regularly. 17 Note that the use of bold type follows the original throughout the paper. Dušan Gabrovšek 104 questions etc │The president makes all the key decisions on foreign policy. [bold type in the original throughout this paper]│ key role/ player/ figure etc (=one with a lot of influence on a result) The show has been hit by the departure of key personnel. Commendable, no doubt, though the extended sequence supplied is not given in bold. But it is there! (2) Cambridge Advanced Learner’s (McIntosh 2013: 851) provides two examples of use s.v. key (adj) but highlights no collocation. One could argue (also in a more general vein) that its two examples, she was a key figure in the international art world. and a key factor in tackling the problem, show two useful binary collocations and even two colligational extensions (in + noun phrase, in + -ing verb). They certainly do, but linguists and lexicographers in particular are painfully aware of how often dictionary examples of use are blissfully ignored or overlooked by dictionary users, particularly if they are indicated in the same way. (3) Another major competitor, the Macmillan (Rundell 2007: 825), provides four examples of use but only highlights the colligation (i.e. grammatical collocation) key to. (4) The most famous of all competitors in the category, Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learner’s (Turnbull and Lea 2010: 847) highlights as many as six binary collocations with key (adj): key issue/ factor/ point (listed separately), key figure, key role and key word (provided as boldfaced parts of sentencelength examples of use) while choosing not to highlight key to - even though it is listed within another sentence-length illustrative example! (5) Finally in the category considered, Collins COBUILD (Sinclair 2006: 788) offers a contextualized “folk” definition, The key person or thing in a group is the most important one., adding the single sentence-length example of He is expected to be the key witness at the trial. No bold type anywhere in sight, aside from that used to highlight the entry word itself. So much for uniformity. Let me point out parenthetically that the makeup and status of extended units can be problematic also in more specialized glossary-type analyses of terminologies; this typically results in (glaring) inconsistencies. Thus an examination of English football jargon (Jellis 2006) lists, inter alia, a number of extended units that are italicized or boldfaced to show their status as units. The fully italicized/ boldfaced ones include get into the squad, coming back from injury, [not to be] caught in possession, [to be] on a yellow card, [to be] shown the red card, [to be] good in the air, etc. However, in other expressions listed, some of the constituents are, for some reason, not given in italics or bold type, implying that they are not really constituents of the expressions: to keep the ball in play, to avoid the offside trap, to lay a ball off to a teammate, Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 105 to score against the run of play, to blow the final whistle, the ball [just] slams into the wall, to make a late tackle in the penalty area, to score the winning goal, for example. Anyway, back to the general-purpose advanced learners’ Longman Dictionary: The binary bias is unmistakable in a number of other entries too, say s.v. wide, sense 1 (Fox and Combley 2014: 2083) [bold type as in the original throughout]: wide smile/ grin As he ran toward me, his face broke into a wide grin. However, there are cases where the extended collocation gets listed, witness e.g. have a high/ low/ good/ bad etc opinion of sb/ sth (ibid., p. 1280), or the entry on observation (ibid., p. 1255) that incorporates, as parts of sentence-length examples, highlighted extended collocations under close observation and keep (sb) under observation as well as, to be sure, the binary-type careful observation, detailed observations, and direct observations. Moreover, in some cases, the two - a binary and an extended collocation - can be found side by side, as in sense 2 of responsibility, ‘blame for something bad that has happened’ [...] [+for] No one wants to take responsibility for the problem. | The surgeon accepted full responsibility for the error that led to her death. | [...] (ibid., p. 1552) Anyway, the other advanced learners’ dictionaries largely follow suit. In any case, virtually all (advanced) learners’ dictionaries of English will characteristically be at pains to show e.g. to mount an attack without ever considering, say, to mount an all-out attack on a town, or to adopt a stance while excluding, as a matter of course, e.g. to adopt a tough stance on terrorism. 5. Dictionaries 2: Special-purpose all-English collocational ones While we do know that L2 learners need access to L2 collocations chiefly for encoding tasks, characteristically in translating from one’s L1 (here Slovene) into an L2 (here English), it is difficult to estimate how many advanced learners take the trouble to consult specialized dictionaries of English collocations (there are four such standard works currently in existence), and how frequently they do that. In any case, it seems logical to assume that being as they are fully collocation-oriented and firmly corpus-based, collocation dictionaries might offer a sound selection of not only binary but also extended collocations listed and shown in a - hopefully - clear and systematic fashion. So, here is a brief look at how the four 18 fare concerning their coverage of extended collocations provided at entries for two nominal bases, viz. deadline (general noun) and goal (more specialized noun; sporting sense{s} only considered): 18 Benson et al. (2009), McIntosh (2009), Rundell (2010), Mayor (2013). Dušan Gabrovšek 106 (6) BBI (Benson et al. 2009: 103, 172) only lists one extended collocation: to work against/ to (BE) a deadline, and one example illustrating the grammatical collocation in goal: Who’s (playing) in goal for Spurs? (7) Oxford (McIntosh 2009: 199, 364) somewhat predictably lists work to a deadline, adding the italicized example we’re working to a very tight deadline and the phraseologically less relevant the deadline for entries (is noon Thursday). Its far more extensive goal entry adds little in the way of extended collocations - only two admittedly useful examples of the team gave away such a soft goal and to score an unfortunate own goal (also provided by the Longman below, further extended by a preposition). (8) Macmillan (Rundell 2010: 180, 330) offers some 20 deadline collocations including, of course, work to a deadline and the examples of to work to tight deadlines, to have clear deadlines, to miss the deadline for submitting entries (for is boldfaced but only shown in the example illustrating the binary collocation to miss the deadline), to set an arbitrary deadline for this work, to extend the deadline for handing in the essay (for not in bold type in the last two examples! ), the application deadline is looming. Its entry on goal, sense 2, lists close to 20 binary collocations, its contextualized examples including to score a winning goal, to score with a well-taken goal, to give away two sloppy goals, to nearly snatch a late goal, to score two fantastic goals, to disallow a perfectly good goal. Commendable, no doubt. (9) Longman (Mayor 2013: 309, 568-569) offers a boldfaced work to a deadline and includes four relevant examples of binary collocations in, well, context (or so it seems): beat Wednesday’s deadline for applications, work to a tight deadline, work to a very strict deadline, the deadline for registration on the course (is 23 January). Next, the sporting sense of goal lists no boldfaced extended collocations but does include as many as five relevant examples of use of binary collocations: [of a player] to head England’s equalizing goal, to score some spectacular goals, to score an unfortunate own goal against [the opposing team], to win with a last-minute goal, the team’s top goal scorer. So, what about the verdict based on the admittedly flimsy evidence above? Rather than duly tabulating the above facts and figures, let me merely summarize for the purposes of this paper by observing that while instances of extended collocations can be occasionally found, particularly in Macmillan, they are provided unsystematically and mostly in a way that obscures their status - merely as italicized contextualized binary collocations so that their phraseological relevance may well be lost on the language learner. Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 107 6. Extended collocations in EFL Extended collocations in an L2 are an important issue for translators and advanced learners. The former will appreciate being offered information they will often find invaluable in translating extended collocations, 19 and the latter will come to a significant insight into one of the ways in which the coselection principle operates in English, that is, one of the ways in which meaning arises from words being combined in diverse non-random ways that go beyond the application of mere grammar rules. Extended collocations are to be introduced on two levels: 1. an all-L2 one (to show the advanced learner one 20 of the [so far largely underrated! ] many diverse “real-language” ways in which meaning arises out of the functioning of the coselection principle), where the advanced learner’s attention is to be drawn to how words combine non-randomly and recurrently in collocation-type sequences of varying length starting with THREE constituents. 2. bilingual one: Extended collocation regarded primarily as a translation (chiefly encoding-oriented) problem that (bilingual) dictionaries only rarely help solve. Indeed, extended collocations could well be shown and highlighted in the context of translation, as an encoding-oriented translation issue focused on two specific languages. In line with this idea, what the bilingual lexicographer should highlight is first and foremost those extended collocations that either are unpredictable from the viewpoint of speakers of L1 or correspond to L1 sequences that are themselves not extended collocations. Examples include SI požeti buren aplavz - EN to win/ earn/ draw thunderous applause ; SI biti močno odvisen od / zanašati se predvsem na - EN to be heavily reliant on ; SI kmalu priti v vodstvo - EN to take an early lead ; SI tesno povesti proti nasprotniku - EN to open (up) a narrow lead over one’s opponent ; SI prejeti poceni gol - EN to concede a soft goal / to give away a goal; SI doseči gol na gostovanju - EN to score an away goal. 21 19 It is likewise significant, and even invaluable, in a bilingual framework, to be offered reliable information on equivalents where one of the languages (L1) does not contain an extended collocation but the other (L2) does: e.g. SI nepričakovano obiskati [‘to unexpectedly visit’] (adv + v) - EN to make a surprise visit (v + attributively used noun + n). 20 One here means extended collocational, where the actual strings differ in terms of both the makeup (basic binary strings plus one or more extensions of different structural types) and overall length. 21 The last item could be regarded as being particularly significant because not only does it display a significant amount of extralinguistic salience in the game of football (soccer) but also calls for a rather uncommon use of away as an adjective rather than an adverb. Dušan Gabrovšek 108 How is one to go about researching all this? What we clearly need in the monolingual all-English context is a realistic framework and access to reallife language data - corpora, then. Of course, this is based on the underlying awareness of the phraseological salience of extended collocations - arrived at primarily by means of frequency data and the substitutability criterion 22 - rather than routinely assigning them a syntactic status, that is, treating them merely as “phrases” on the level of the functioning of the open-choice (=grammar-based) principle of language generation. This said, we will need to first examine the occurrence of specific structural types of extended collocations, perhaps starting with adj + noun combinations expanded by means of adjectives (collocationally) and/ or prepositions or prepositional phrases and/ or pattern-type verbal structures (colligationally). Once this is done, we will have to cast our net wider. At the same time, we will need to address and look at the phenomenon in the encoding-oriented bilingual framework, where the two basic contrastive principles will definitely loom large, i.e. the semantic one (predictability of L1 equivalents) and the structural one ([non-]congruence). Either way, the extended collocation must first be recognized for what it is - not infrequently a phraseologically significant sequence that needs to be shown, albeit selectively, as such. 7. Envoy I am sure that Professor Allan James, in whose honor, on the occasion of his retirement, I have written this paper, likes the idea of extending - whether extending trips, a warm welcome, thanks, an invitation, one’s hand, perhaps even credit. Nice things, no doubt. Though not to be associated himself with extensions of any conceivable kind, Allan is a nice guy too - one of the few academic linguists I can think of who invariably bring to mind the best of academia in ways that are not exactly a common occurrence: friendship, kindness, honesty, openness, warmth are the five key words. Need I say more? 22 For instance, while Sinclair’s (1996: 87) oft-invoked (barely) visible to the naked eye, discussed as an example of semantic preference where to/ with the naked eye exhibits a strong tendency to occur with expressions of “visibility,” shows few occurrences of the full string compared to the one without the initial adverb, standard corpora of English show NO occurrence at all of the full string incorporating either of the two synonymous adverbs, hardly and scarcely. Extended “experiential” collocation brought to the fore 109 References Benson, Morton W., Evelyn Benson & Robert F. Ilson. 1986. Lexicographic Description of English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benson, Morton W., Evelyn Benson & Robert F. Ilson. (comps.) 2009. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. 3 rd edn. rev. by Robert Ilson. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blass, Anne-Katrin. 2012. Textual functions of extended lexical units: a case study of phrasal constructions built around by way of. ICAME Journal 36 (April): 5-29. Retrieved from http: / / icame.uib.no/ ij36/ Pages_5-30.pdf BNC - British National Corpus. Retrieved from http: / / corpus.byu.edu/ bnc/ COCA - Corpus of Contemporary American English. Created by Mark Davies. At http: / / corpus.byu.edu/ coca/ Danielsson, Pernilla. 2007. What constitutes a unit of analysis in language? Linguistik Online 31 (2): 17-24. Retrieved from http: / / www.linguistikonline.de/ 31_07/ index.html. Ding, Jianxin. 2009. Collocations: experiential grammar and conventionalization of travel advertising. Journal of Cambridge Studies 4 (1): 35-49. Retrieved from http: / / journal.acs-cam.org.uk/ data/ archive/ 2009/ 200901-article6.pdf. Fox, Chris & Rosalind Combley (eds.). 2014. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 6 th edn. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. Gabrovšek, Dušan. 2012. Experiential phraseology and the bilingual dictionary. Paper presented at EUROPHRAS 2012, Maribor, Phraseology and Culture, University of Maribor, August 27-30, 2012. Gledhill, Christopher John. 2000. Collocations in Science Writing. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Gledhill, Christopher John. 2011. The ‘lexicogrammar’ approach to analysing phraseology and collocation in ESP texts. ASp: La revue du GERAS 59 (March): 5- 23. Jellis, Susan. 2006. Lifting the silverware: an exploration of English football jargon. MED Magazine 37 (April). Retrieved from http: / / www.macmillandictionaries.com/ MED-Magazine/ April2006/ 37-Feature-Football-Jargon.htm Mayor, Michael. (ed.) 2013. Longman Collocations Dictionary and Thesaurus. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. McIntosh, Colin. (ed.) 2009. Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English. 2 nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, Colin. (ed.) 2013. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. 4 th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearce, Michael. 2007. The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Pearce, Michael. 2014. Key function words in a corpus of UK election manifestos. Linguistik online 65 (3): 23-44. Retrieved from https: / / bop.unibe.ch/ linguistikonline/ article/ view/ 1447. Rundell, Michael (ed.). 2007. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. 2 nd edn. Oxford: Macmillan Education. Rundell, Michael (ed.). 2010. Macmillan Collocations Dictionary. Oxford: Macmillan Education. Sinclair, John McHardy. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dušan Gabrovšek 110 Sinclair, John McHardy. 1996. The Search for Units of Meaning. Textus 9 (1): 75-106. Also in John McHardy Sinclair & Ronald A. Carter (eds.). 2004. Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse, 24-48. London: Routledge. Sinclair, John McHardy (ed.). 2006. Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary. 5 th edn. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers. Turnbull, Joanna & Diana Lea (eds.). 2010. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. By A.S. Hornby. 8 th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eva-Maria Graf Forms and functions of metadiscourse in goaloriented talk-in-interaction: The case of executive coaching Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction Abstract Metadiscourse, defined most broadly as “discourse about the ongoing discourse”, takes on many forms and functions across both written and spoken discourse types. This paper addresses metadiscourse in executive coaching, a relatively recent and booming helping profession from the organizational context. In so doing, this paper is part of the more recent linguistic interest in metadiscourse in spoken language (see, e.g., Penz 2016) and adds to our growing linguistic understanding of this multifaceted core feature of spoken interaction. Based on findings from a prior study (Graf 2015a), it will be argued that due to the still fickle state of coaching as activity and discourse type, metadiscourse, besides other functions, plays a truly constitutive role of discourse as socio-cultural practice in this particular form of goal-oriented professional spoken interaction. 1. Metadiscourse: Steps towards defining an elusive linguistic concept This section will briefly outline the various approaches and definitions discussed in the context of the fuzzy concept of ‘metadiscourse’ given that “(m)etadiscourse is essentially an open category which can be realized in numerous ways” (Amiryousefi & Rasekh 2010: 159). For the purpose and the argumentation of the current paper, the endocentric compound ‘metadiscourse’ will be approached from two angles: first from the angle of the modifier ‘meta’ and second from the angle of the head ‘discourse’. While research on metadiscourse is predominantly focusing on its forms and functions in written language, the current contribution investigates metadiscourse in spoken interaction. Most studies on metadiscourse (or ‘meta-talk’, ‘metalanguage’, ‘metacommunication’) embark on their endeavor with reference to Hockett (1960) and his claim that reflexivity is a distinctive design feature of language: the fact that we as humans can use language to talk about language and thus reflect on language sets our way of communicating apart from any other Eva-Maria Graf 112 form of animal communication, irrespective of the latter’s complexity. Another classic early reference to metadiscourse is Jakobson’s (1960) metalinguistic function of language as one of his six basic functions of language: According to Jakobson, we use metadiscourse whenever the addresser or addressee needs to check up whether they are using the same code. The field of linguistics (both as regards academic research, e.g. the current paper, and its instruction as academic discipline) thereby represents an obvious case in point when it comes to illustrating what is meant by linguistic reflexivity. Yet, producing discourse about the ongoing discourse is a pervasive element across both written and spoken language also in the context of less obvious and much smaller linguistic units such as metalinguistic verbs like to ask, to comment or to define. In order to concretize the illusive concept of metadiscourse a bit, its various readings can be organized according to mode, scope, function and position or direction of reference (for an extensive overview see, e.g., Penz 2016). While mode refers to either spoken or written metadiscourse, scope refers to “the span of discourse that serves as a focal context for meta-talk” (Schiffrin 1980: 204); the span can range from isolated verbs such as the ones listed above to longer parts of discourse or sequences such as the examples discussed further down in Section 3. Function refers to the purpose (a piece of) metadiscourse fulfills for the referred-to discourse and the participants in a particular context and co-text. The functions of metadiscourse can generally be seen in describing, organizing and commenting on the ongoing discourse, often serving the purpose of securing understanding and supporting acceptance (see also Techtmeier’s (2001: 1454) three basic functions of metacommunicative utterances). However, given that many utterances or stretches of discourse are multifunctional, to identify metalanguage is difficult due to the vagueness of the boundaries between metalinguistic and other functions (see Schiffrin 1980: 201; Techtmeier 2001: 1457; Ädel 2006: 23). A particular form can only be classified as serving a meta-discursive function in a particular coand context. And finally, as expounded by Bublitz (2001), metadiscourse can be applied both prospectively and retrospectively in order to negotiate and manage understanding of the interaction partners. The preemptive application of metadiscourse may serve all the named functions; a reactive application may additionally serve as an interactive repair (see Example 2 below). While an underlying and unifying aspect of all readings of metadiscourse is conceptualizing writing or speaking as a ‘social engagement’ (Hyland 2005; Amiryousefi & Rasekh 2010), the use, i.e. forms and functions, of metadiscourse has been found to vary substantially across different genres and different cultures (see Mauranen 1993, 2010; Hyland 2005; Ädel 2006; Penz 2011, 2016; Graf 2015a). These differences are not surprising in view of findings that metadiscourse may provide some insights into underlying Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 113 interactional and pragmatic norms of language use. Despite such variability, metadiscourse is reported to be a common feature of goal-oriented, workrelated activity types, used for textual aspects such as clarifying meanings, describing and labeling the preceding etc. (cf. Penz 2011: 185). One strand of research focuses on talk exchange in intercultural and / or academic settings, where English is often used as lingua franca; metadiscourse is essential for guaranteeing understanding in contexts of great linguistic diversity (see, e.g., the work by Penz 2011, 2016; Mauranen 1993, 2010 or Hyland 2005). Another goal-oriented, work-related activity type where metadiscourse figures high is the discourse of helping professions as in doctor-patient interaction, counseling and therapy talk, or - as in the current paper - in executive coaching interaction. Helping professions are defined as … a professional interaction between a helping expert and a client, initiated to nurture the growth of, or address the problems of a person's physical, psychological, intellectual or emotional constitution, including medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychological counseling, social work, education or coaching… (Graf et al. 2014: 1). The helping element itself resides both in the particular (empathic) relationship between the interaction partners and in their conversations that center on co-constructing relevant knowledge for the client that solves his or her concern (cf. Graf & Spranz-Fogasy in print). Such co-construction of relevant knowledge transpires in exploring, challenging, elaborating, reframing etc. the client’s perspective - via meta-discursive practices in the context of the ‘negotiation of meaning’ (Pawelczyk 2011), which is a discursive norm or endemic feature of those helping professions that aim at clients’ self-reflection and emotional understanding. Martínez Guillem (2009: 742) suggests that metadiscourse allows speakers to invoke knowledge about both the ongoing interaction and other past or future communicative events, by (re)framing an issue as contextually (in-) appropriate or by (re)defining participants’ categorizations (see, e.g., Luke & Gordon 2012 and Gordon & Luke 2016 on supervisors’ use of reinforcement, reframing and advice to re-author the supervisory narrative). For the activity type of ‘psychotherapy’ Bartesaghi (2009: 23) states more specifically that “(t)alk about communication - how, when and why clients communicate, hear, talk, listen and mean - is at the core of session exchanges”. Formulations and interpretations have thereby been classified as essential and defining elements of therapeutic discourse (Antaki et al. 2005; Bercelli et al. 2008; Peräkylä 2011). Both refer to the therapists or professionals’ discursive treatment of the clients’ prior utterance with the purpose of changing or adding to the clients’ perspective. Given that executive coaching - redefined as psycho-managerial discourse (Schulz 2013; Graf 2015a) - entails therapeutic strategies as part of its hybrid discursive makeup (Pawelczyk & Graf 2011; Graf & Pawelczyk 2014), the latter finding is of Eva-Maria Graf 114 particular interest for the current discussion: a coach’s core communicative task in the context of the basic activity of ‘Co-Constructing Change’ (see Section 2) is (re-)interpreting and reformulating what clients present as their concerns; this is done retrospectively via meta-linguistic verbs such as e.g. you mean or we could say that. However, as will be argued later on, metadiscourse in executive coaching materializes in two quite distinctive types, differentiated both as regards their scope, their function and their direction of reference: whereas metadiscourse on the textual level of executive coaching seems to fulfill similar local functions as those reported in other work-related activity types, i.e. to organize, describe and comment on the ongoing discourse in order to guide the communicative partner’s interpretation of the discourse under way (cf. Mauranen 2007: 4), metadiscourse on the social-practice level acts prospectively and fulfills more global and constitutive functions in executive coaching. In order to focus on this more global scope of metadiscourse in executive coaching, let us now turn to the second part the compound ‘metadiscourse’, i.e. to the head ‘discourse’. For the current endeavor, discourse, i.e. a form of social practice in which language plays a central role, is understood along Fairclough’s tripartite reading: “Any discursive ‘event’ (i.e. any instance of discourse) is seen as being simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice” (1992: 4). In analogy then, metadiscourse spreads out on the textual level, on the level of discursive practices and on the level of social practices, too: Whereas metadiscourse on the textual level refers to verbs such as to ask, to comment or to define as mentioned above, metadiscourse on the level of discursive practices refers to turn taking in talk-in-interaction, e.g. to a professional’s reformulation or interpretation in a follow-up turn to a client’s formulation or representation. On the socio-cultural level, metadiscourse might be understood in the sense of interaction types, defined as … bounded (parts of) conversations with an inherent structuring of opening, core interaction and closing section, in which participants solve complex communicative tasks. The specific interaction the participants engage in thereby evinces the respective interaction type. To put it differently, the principal communicative task(s) define(s) the overall rationale of the (specific part of the) conversation, i.e. the interaction type. Interaction types are thus both located on the macro-level of interaction, when referring to entire conversations or interactions such as the anamnestic interview and on the meso-level of interaction, when referring to parts of conversations that center on clearly demarcated communicative tasks within the overall layout of the interaction (such as troubles telling in psychotherapy) (Graf et al. 2014: 1f). Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 115 As will be argued further down, the communicative tasks that form part of the basic activity ‘Defining the Situation’ are such larger interaction units at the macroor meso-level of coaching discourse. Another relevant aspect in the definition of ‘discourse’ is its constructive aspect as put forth by Foucault (1972: 49), who defines discourse as “…. practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak”. These constitutive characteristics of discourse are the basis for the argument elaborated here: ‘talking about coaching’ as a form of metadiscourse is a constitutive part of ‘talking coaching’ and as such is an endemic part of coaching as professional helping interaction. The head ‘discourse’ is of importance in yet another sense for the current discussion: the professional helping format of ‘coaching’ is constituted in and through discourse, i.e. language and interaction are its primary means and methods to ‘do coaching’. As such, coaching represents a discourse type and activity type according to Sarangi (2002) and Levinson (1979). The ‘discourse of coaching’ refers first of all to the concrete communicative interaction in which the participants, i.e. the coach and client, engage and through which the very action of coaching is constituted. This “text as action” perspective regards discourse as a particular way of acting and interacting linguistically (cf. Fairclough 2003: 17). An analytic focus on this micro-level dimension of discourse is the necessary prerequisite to extract the discursive techniques or practices that constitute a particular type of discourse (Fairclough 1992, 2003), broadly defined as specific manifestations of language form in their interactional contexts. While this textual level of coaching is the starting point of the linguistic analysis here, the primary focus lies on carving out the underlying and recurring discursive practices that help define coaching as proper discourse type. As social practice or phenomenon, the ‘discourse of coaching’ refers to the multiple meanings that are bestowed on coaching as a professional helping format and organizational intervention in late modern (Western) society. Coaching embodies the postmodern ideal of “living and working in a communication culture” (Cameron 2000) and a therapeutic culture (Furedi 2004), which stress the importance of a reflexive and emotionally competent and open self (Giddens 1991; Illouz 2007). Wodak (2001: 66) summarizes this last aspect by explicating the interrelation of discourse and society from a more general point of view: (a) discourse is a way of signifying a particular domain of social practice from a particular perspective … We assume a dialectical relationship between particular discursive practices and the specific field of action (including situations, institutional frames and social structures), in which they are embedded. On the one hand, the situational, institutional and social settings shape and affect discourses, and on the other, discourses influence discursive as well as nondiscursive social and political processes and actions. Eva-Maria Graf 116 While coaching has now been introduced briefly from an outside-thepractice, discourse-analytic perspective, the format/ process will next be described from an inside-the-practice, professional perspective. 2. Executive Coaching: Steps towards defining a professional discourse Executive coaching represents a relatively recent, yet booming professional helping format located in the organizational context. Kilburg describes it as follows: (…) a helping relationship formed between a client who has managerial authority and responsibility in an organization and a consultant who uses a wide variety of behavioral techniques and methods to assist the client to achieve a mutually identified set of goals to improve his or her professional performance and personal satisfaction and consequently to improve the effectiveness of the client’s organization within a formally defined coaching agreement. (Kilburg 2000: 65f) Greif (2008) in turn talks about coaching as ‘goal-oriented self-reflection’, nicely elucidating with this term the double functionality of executive coaching: while learning and development as the ultimate goal in coaching serve the client’s personal and professional advancement, such change is always in the organization’s interest, given that an executive’s advancement helps him or her to achieve peak performance etc. (cf. Graf under review). Given this double-functionality, Schulz (2013) refers to coaching as ‘psychomanagerial discourse’. At the beginning of the 21 st century, the counseling format coaching features three salient characteristics: 1) its wide-ranging global application as a key measure in human resource, organizational development and life-long learning, 2) the stark contrast between the available coaching practice literature and the lack of academic research and conceptual foundation and 3) its unresolved and undefined professional status. For the present paper, only the latter characteristic is relevant: Coaching is currently in the process of establishing itself as a profession in its own right, with clearly defined professional practices, specific academic qualifications and licensing requirements, generally accepted and valid professional credentials and a code of ethics as well as a common body of knowledge and skills (see e.g. Berndt 2011). While traditional professions such as medicine or psychology have grown out of or have at least been accompanied by an academic foundation and conceptualization, coaching has a different history of development. It has not emerged from an academic field; instead “the practice of coaching had [has, EG] moved far ahead of the existing knowledge base” (Cavanagh, Grant and Kemp 2005: v). While coaching at present is an applied and established field of practice (Joo 2005: 463; Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 117 Bachkirova et al. 2010: 1), its cross-disciplinary methodology and the heterogeneous educational backgrounds of its professionals as well as its vast areas of application pose major difficulties to its striving for professionalization and thus to regulating this field of practice: “(g)iven that each of the professional bodies within the coaching field take a different view of the criteria for professional status, gaining agreement as to what constitutes the ‘profession’ of coaching is difficult” (Lane et al. 2010: 361). Besides criteria such as institutional autonomy and questions of accreditation, examination and qualification, the notion of a profession centers on a technical and specialized knowledge as well as on the professional expertise of its members. That is, professions hold a legal monopoly on their knowledge-based services, which entails status and respectability and thus suggests a certain social order. Yet, it is especially this shared technical and specialized knowledge base which is currently (partly) lacking in coaching. Federations such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF) or the Deutsche Bundesverband Coaching (German Association of Coaching) (DBVC) are working on extracting a common body of knowledge in coaching as well as on the necessary prerequisites for establishing certification requirements and qualification procedures for executive coaches. Given its heterogeneous roots, a key concern in the professionalization debate centers on differentiating coaching from other counseling formats such as training, consulting and especially, (psycho)therapy. According to Hudson (1999: 52), the entrepreneurial character of coaching sets it apart from traditional helping professions, i.e. those professions that nurture the growth of or address the problems of people’s physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional or spiritual well-being as found in medicine, psychotherapy, social work, etc. (Graf et al. 2014; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy in press). Coaching is often defined ex negativo and following Peltier (2010: xxix) as “(i)t is no accident that management consultants often start by declaring what coaching is not”. Yet, whereas the lack of a clear professional status of coaching is theoretically discussed, its practical and local consequences in the here-andnow of the coaching conversation, i.e. its concrete linguistic and discursive significance, has received neither practical nor academic attention. In a recent discourse-analytic study of executive coaching (Graf 2015a), investigating into the endemic discursive characteristics of coaching, four basic communicative activities were abductively carved out of the coaching data 1 : ‘Defining the Situation’, ‘Building the Relationship’, ‘Co-Constructing 1 The data are comprised of 9 complete coaching processes of one male and one female coach and their 9 executive clients from the banking, insurance and consulting sector (each process contains between 3 and 9 sessions; each sessions lasts between 2 and 2.5 hours). The data, roughly 145 hours of authentic coaching conversation, was Eva-Maria Graf 118 Change’ and ‘Evaluating the Coaching’. These activities, together with their respective core communicative tasks allow for describing executive coaching along its individual sessions and whole coaching processes and allow for setting coaching apart from surrounding discourse types such as psychotherapy (see also Graf 2015b; Graf under review). For the current purpose, the basic activity ‘Defining the Situation’ is of particular interest given that: (t)he principal function of ‘Defining the Situation’ is to orient the participants, namely the executive clients, as regards the local and global layout of the coaching encounter, i.e. to establish a common fund of knowledge relevant to interaction goals. Such orientation happens along the methodological, procedural, thematic and temporal line. (Graf 2015a: 349) ‘Defining the Situation’ then materializes in or as ‘talking about coaching’ in order to enable ‘talking coaching’. To be more precise, talking about coaching transpires in and through the following communicative tasks: ‘Establishing the Coaching Realm’, ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing of Coaching’ and ‘Temporal Framing of Coaching’ (cf. Graf 2015a: 351). While such framing practices are explicitly addressed in the coaching practice literature 2 , neither their linguistic and interactive layout nor their constitutive function for coaching as such have - as was already mentioned above - so far been recognized. In what follows, data examples from the basic activity ‘Defining the Situation’ and in particular from its communicative core component ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing of Coaching’ are showcased to illustrate the truly constitutive function of metadiscourse in the discourse of executive coaching 3 . videotaped by the coaches themselves and was linguistically transcribed via HIAT (Ehlich 1992). The data was analyzed with the help of an Integrative Discourse Analysis based on Conversation Analysis, (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics and Theme-Oriented Discourse Analysis. The categories for the analysis were abductively developed; they stem both from the coaching practice literature and from relevant linguistic studies of surrounding helping professions such as psychotherapy, counseling or doctor-patient interaction. 2 Schreyögg (2003: 324; translated EG) for example claims: In contrast with formal contracts, which can usually already be concluded in first interviews, the negotiation of processes and definition of situations are fixed components of the entire coaching process. In principle, they can be carried out from the initial contact on the phone up until the coaching process comes to a close. 3 For examples of the other core components of ‚Defining the Situation‘, i.e. ‘Establishing the Coaching Realm’ and ‘Temporal Framing of Coaching’ and their meta-discursive functioning in the discourse of executive coaching see Graf (2015a, b). Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 119 3. Metadiscourse in Executive Coaching: Data examples from ‘Defining the Situation’ and its core component ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing of Coaching’ As mentioned above, the lack of professional and institutional standardization of coaching bears on the concrete interactions of coach and client in the here-and-now of their coaching conversations. Seeing our GP is familiar to us and we have scripts or mental schemata available that enable us to interpret e.g. the doctor’s question ‘How are you doing today’ as an inquiry into a health conditional issue that motivated us to see the doctor in the first place 4 . Coaching, however, is (still) a fuzzy professional format, used in an inflationary way for all kinds of more or less professional counseling or consulting formats. Professionals thus cannot take a client’s knowledge concerning procedure and methods of executive coaching for granted. The primary function of the communicative task ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing of Coaching’ thus is to pre-emptively give orientation in order to avoid interactional trouble and to compensate for the lack of security and common ground as regards the speech event or activity type of coaching. To this end, the communicative task is high on the coaches’ professional agenda at the very beginning of coaching interactions with their clients, i.e. it is interactionally relevant during the onset of first sessions and delivered in lengthy and detailed information-delivery sequences (Silverman 1997) initiated by the coaches. Example 1 (CO1CL3_1) 5 Clients’ unfamiliarity with coaching and their resulting insecurity is captured in the quote by the female coach CO1, who sanctions and emphatically meets her client’s feeling of suspense as regards their interaction as follows: In that sense, I can really appreciate that, it’s something new. Going to the doctor’s is familiar, I think. You don’t have to go to a coach every day (not in transcript). The excerpt, following the quote, illustrates how the coach further meets the client’s insecurity. 4 Drew & Heritage (1992: 25) talk about “distinctive features of interactional inferences” as one characteristic of professional and institutional discourse. 5 The coaching processes are completely anonymized and represented via the following code: CO1 stands for the female coach (CO2 refers to the male coach), CL3 for one male client and the number 1 refers to the first coaching session of the coaching process CO1CL3. The transcript is to be read like a stave notation, [v] stands for the verbal mode (in other examples there is also [nv] indicating the nonverbal mode). Eva-Maria Graf 120 Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 121 The coach topicalizes the method Now, as for how I proceed (line 38) via quoting the client’s lines (lines 38f: because you said you’re also wondering what will happen) and unburdens the client via semantically framing her how I proceed (line 38) rather vaguely as completely normal (line 39) and as we talk to each other (line 39) or go into the topics in more detail (line 41). Yet, she also - although in a less explicit form than in other processes - introduces her professional focus on the client’s intra-personal or emotional experiences by using the Emotional Intelligence (EI) vocabulary sense your feelings more closely (line 42) and by opposing rationality or reflection as in head (line 47) and emotionality or experiencing what actually happens (line 49). The client confirms the coach’s elaborations explicitly via yes, good (line 50), i.e. he ratifies the procedure himself. The coach personalizes her information delivery via frequently using the personal pronouns I, we and you, by inserting direct questions (line 44: what exactly is happening there? ), by quoting the client (lines 38f: because you said you’re also wondering what will happen), and as part of the overall recipient design (Drew 2013), she orients to the client’s implicitly announced apprehensions concerning coaching and psy-measures in general. While Example 1 illustrates a prototypical methodological informationdelivery sequence from a first coaching session, which represents a prospective use of metadiscourse in Bublitz’s (2001) sense, the following examples showcase a retrospective use of meta-pragmatic methodological and procedural framing strategies. While a prospective use pre-emptively prepares the common ground as regards sharing methodological and Eva-Maria Graf 122 procedural knowledge, a retrospective use of these framing strategies serves as an interactional repair. This will be illustrated in Example 2 below. Example 2_Part_1 (CO2CL5_2) In what follows, the coach initiates a metadiscourse on his way of interacting with the client up to that moment during both the first and the current session, namely by talking a lot and giving a lot of input, i.e. doing consulting with him: I talked quite a lot and gave you advice (line 251). The coach initiates a readjustment sequence: accounting for his doing by an ego-referential epistemic expression something which struck me (line 249), he pre-announces his next procedural step via an agenda statement I’d like to go back to it again for a bit (lines 249f). He offers a description of his past interaction with the client and thereby explicitly contrasts coaching with management consulting, another Human Resources (HR) intervention. In doing so, he defines management consulting as a format where the professional talks a lot, i.e. gives a lot of input. Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 123 This definition of management consulting motivates the client to inquire about a definition of coaching: coaching. What would be the function of coaching then? (lines 253f in Example 2_Part2 below): Example 2_Part2 (CO2CL5_2) The coach, in an aligning manner, latches onto the following definition of coaching as found across the coaching manuals: coaching is more about helping people to help themselves (line 254). Next, he details helping people to help themselves as follows: he pre-empts their further interaction as a more detailed looking at things (line 256: to look into that more closely) and as the client’s job (lines 256f: to let you find out for yourself who you are. How do you come across? And what are your starting points for bringing about change? ). In what follows next (not in transcript), the client asks the coach whether or not certain actions (e.g. that I try to tell you more about how I see certain selfobservations in relation to myself) belong to coaching, and the coach positively assesses the client’s understanding of coaching or coaching actions (precisely, precisely, that’s more about coaching). In his role as professional expert, the coach finishes this sequence with his professional assessment and definition of their future interaction of ‘coaching’: so that we work a lot more on your self- Eva-Maria Graf 124 reflection and monitoring yourself. In this sequence then, the client does not passively accept the coach’s definition of coaching but initiates a negotiation process in order to arrive at a mutually shared definition of coaching. Next, coach and client discuss what they have topicalized so far (not in transcript: your strategy at first level management in the system into which you have moved) and the coach categorizes the topic of ‘Strategic Behavior as Executive in New Position’ as a topic of management consulting, which requires a different type of interaction between professional and client: I have also told you a lot about … what I would do in that situation. The coach finalizes this retrospective assessment as regards their methodological and thematic orientation using the gist formulation: the pendulum has just swung a bit towards management consulting (not in transcript). The coach keeps up the image of the pendulum and continues to define Emotionally Intelligent Coaching by explicitly referring to his professional expertise as coach (not in transcript: what I can actually do well would be to swing back towards selfreflection, self-management, personality development). While the discourse of executive coaching contains many more instances of metadiscourse in the context of both ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing’ and in the other core components of the basic activity ‘Defining the Situation’, the two examples given and discussed hopefully suffice to highlight the distinct character of spoken metadiscourse in its socio-cultural scope (via the use and application of particular discursive practices) in the discourse of coaching. This last point will be rounded out in the following concluding remarks. 4. Conclusion: Executive Coaching - An interdiscursive professional practice between discourse and metadiscourse According to Hyland (2005), metadiscourse is a central pragmatic construct that enables speakers to interact with their receivers to achieve a successful communication. While achieving or guaranteeing a successful communication in more established professional formats refers to actions such as organising, describing, and commenting on the ongoing discourse with the communicative intent of the speaker to guide the hearer in interpreting the discourse (cf. Mauranen 2007: 4), achieving or guaranteeing a successful communication in executive coaching requires much more: Metadiscourse in executive coaching does not primarily help to clarify lexical meaning or increase the explicitness about topics discussed, about discourse structure or illocutionary intent (cf. Penz 2016), but first and foremost enables the creation of a common interactional ground on which ‘doing coaching’, i.e. the discourse of coaching, becomes possible in the first place. To speak with Mauranen (2007: 5), “(g)aps in shared knowledge can be bridged by strate- Metadiscourse in goal-oriented talk-in-interaction 125 gies of enhanced clarity and explicitness. Thus the demand for cooperativeness and explicitness can be expected to rise in comparison to stable local discourse or speech communities”. However, unlike in the EFL-project context addressed by Mauranen, Penz and others, the ‘referent’ or ‘designate’ of metadiscourse (Schiffrin’s (1980) ‘scope’) in coaching is the coaching discourse as whole. Based on the insights from a recent discourseanalytic study on coaching (Graf 2015a), it is therefore claimed that metadiscourse here serves a truly constitutive function: Coaching represents a relatively new discursive domain or, to speak with Bjorkeng et al. (2008), coaching is still in an embryonic state. The lack of clear-cut professional boundaries, i.e. the undefined professional and institutional status of coaching, leads to a lack of institutional routines for the participants at the level of the concrete interaction. One local consequence is that “defining the speech activity is part of the problem in getting the work done” (Roberts and Sarangi 1999: 227). Such defining practices usually transpire mainly backstage, “along the way”, in (more) established professional formats such as therapy or doctor-patient interaction (cf. Vehviläinen 1999: 88). Yet, the coaching data show that the discursive practices that orient the clients as regards the ongoing interaction along its internal set-up and thematic layout, but also as regards its time frame, etc. are part and parcel of coaching discourse. In other words, the basic activity ‘Defining the Situation’ and its communicative tasks ‘Establishing the Coaching Realm’, ‘Setting the Time Frame’ and in particular the communicative task ‘Methodological and Procedural Framing of Coaching’ with its meta-discursive informationdelivery sequences during which coaching relevant procedural and methodological information is transferred to the clients, occupy front stage in the professional context of executive coaching. According to Sarangi (2000: 19), “explicit definitions of situation are called for at times of interactional trouble”. Looking at the current data we can reformulate the quote as follows: explicit definitions of situations are also called for in the context of uncertainty to offer orientation and stability and thus to preempt possible interactional trouble. Finally, the omnipresent metadiscourse of ‘coaching’ fulfills a second relevant coaching-endemic function: Engaging in such meta-discursive practices allows for the creative and flexible adaption of the professional format to the needs, requirements and personal pre-conditions of the individual client. Following Greif (2008: 231), each coach-client encounter represents a unique and irreproducible constellation with its particular prerequisites, prior experiences and specific context of situation. This flexibility as regards the thematic orientation, interactive procedure and temporal framing represents a relevant success factor in coaching (Greif 2008: 154). However, such flexibility can only be acted out within the confines of the surrounding professional theory and professional agenda. Eva-Maria Graf 126 What is more, it needs to be locally negotiated by the participants in the here-and-now of their coaching encounter, i.e. coach and client engage in meta-discursive framing and defining practices as regards their individual set-up of coaching in order to engage in a successful interaction. Despite this multi-functional interactional relevance and omnipresence of coaching metadiscourse in the data, the phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed in the research on coaching and has received little attention in its constitutive function in the theoryand practice-oriented literature on coaching. While it is expounded that coaching is often defined ex negativo, the reverse case, i.e. that coaches start by declaring what coaching is, is not found in the literature on coaching. As such, the findings of the integrative discourse analysis reported in this paper bring to our attention discursive practices which coaches and in particular, coaching theory, are not explicitly aware of (cf. Leudar et al. 2006: 28). To speak with Peräkylä et al. (2005: 106), “(g)enerally, it is clear that any professional theory is but one constituent of institutional interaction. Empirical interaction research, then, has the potential to analyze contextual features that participants orient to, even when professional theory does not mention them”. In Goodwin and Duranti’s (1992) sense we can conclude that coaching discourse IS and MUST BE contextualized by other coaching discourse, i.e. by coaching metadiscourse, in order to locally make up for its lack of institutional routines and thus to guarantee the transpiring of the proper functions of coaching discourse, that is, establishing and processing the clients’ concern and evaluating their learning and development for themselves and for the larger organizational purpose of the intervention. One may wonder whether the growing familiarity of executive clients with the discursive event of ‘executive coaching’ turns this aspect of the metadiscourse of coaching into a backstage activity as is the case in more established professional helping formats. 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Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/ An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Vol 2, 1449-1463. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Vehviläinen, Sann. 1999. Structures of Counselling Interaction. A Conversation Analytic Study of Counselling Encounters in Career Guidance Training. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Wodak, Ruth. 2001. The discourse-historical approach. In Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer (eds.), 63-94. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Gregor Chudoba Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen und seine Bedeutung für den Ausspracheunterricht mit türkischsprachigen Deutschlernenden Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen Abstract (English) Both nature and relevance of word stress in Turkish are disputed. Whereas some claim final stress position in Turkish (Rolffs 2010: 77), others stipulate initial stress position or contest the existence of word stress in Turkish altogether (Kern 2013: 98). Closer inspection shows that the phonetic means for assigning prominence to syllables may differ significantly between English or German and Turkish. Whereas the two Germanic languages effect a change in volume, length and pitch of the stressed syllable, Turkish permits a disjunction of the three parameters. Thus, in the Turkish threesyllabic word şeftali ['ʃefta: li] (E. peach), the first syllable may be uttered louder, the second longer and the third higher than the other two. It therefore remains unclear which syllable is to be considered as stressed. Additionally, the reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables, commonly practised in German and English, rendering stressed syllables clearer than others, is far less prevalent in Turkish. Consequently, the indiscriminate use of the term word stress for German, English and Turkish wrongly implies an identity of denotata, negatively affecting the practice of language teaching. Following a discussion of word stress in Turkish and German, the article provides examples of approaches to teaching German word stress to Turkish learners, under the assumption that a similar approach may be useful for English as the target language. 1 Abstract (Deutsch) Art und Bedeutung des Wortakzents im Türkischen sind umstritten. Von apodiktischen Feststellungen wie: „Der Akzent liegt bei türkischen Wörtern generell auf der letzten Silbe“ (Rolffs 2010: 217) reicht das Spektrum bis hin zur Aussage, die Wortbetonung sei „phonetisch schwach oder nicht 1 In der Polyphony of English Studies fällt ein in Deutsch geschriebener Artikel aus der Reihe. Angesichts der Vertrautheit von Professor Allan James mit der Phonologie des Deutschen, seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der Didaktik des Ausspracheunterrichts und seiner langjährigen Tätigkeit in der Türkei erschien die Wahl von Thema und Sprache des Artikels aber als der Festschrift angemessen. Gregor Chudoba 132 existent“ (Kern 2013: 98). Bei näherer Betrachtung zeigt sich, dass die phonetischen Mittel, die im Deutschen zur Hervorhebung der Akzentsilbe eingesetzt werden, sich von denjenigen unterscheiden, die im Türkischen Anwendung finden. Während im Deutschen betonte Silben durch aneinander gekoppelte Veränderungen von Lautstärke, Tonhöhe und Dauer gekennzeichnet sind, erlaubt das Türkische die Trennung der drei Parameter: Im türkischen Wort şeftali ['ʃefta: li] (dt. Pfirsich) wird die erste Silbe lauter, die zweite länger und die letzte höher als die beiden jeweils anderen artikuliert. Die undifferenzierte Verwendung des Begriffs Wortakzent für das Deutsche und das Türkische bedeutet somit eine Irreführung, deren Folgen sich vor allem in der Didaktik von DaF/ DaZ nachteilig bemerkbar machen. Desideratum ist eine präzise und nuancierte Einführung des Wortakzents für Deutschlernende mit türkischer Muttersprache, welche anhand von Beispielen skizziert werden soll. Entsprechungen beim Wortakzent im Englischen und für den Unterricht von Englisch für türkische Lernende werden ebenso kurz angesprochen. 2 1. Einleitung Vignette 1 Ercan [eɹ'ʤan], ein zweisprachig Türkisch/ Deutsch aufgewachsener Freund, arbeitet neben seinem Studium in einem Fahrradkurierbüro in Graz. Während eines Besuchs im Büro werde ich zunehmend unruhiger: seine österreichischen Kollegen rufen ihn beständig ['eɐʧan] und er korrigiert sie nicht. Kann man nicht wenigstens auf die richtige Akzentsetzung hinweisen? Ich frage ihn: Ercan, stört es dich nicht, wenn sie dich so rufen? Ercan: Nein, wieso? - Du heißt doch [eɹ'ʤan]. - Ja. - Aber die rufen dich ['eɐʧan]. - So heiße ich ja! Der Erwerb des Wortakzents ist als erster Schritt im Ausspracheunterricht DaF 3 allgemein anerkannt (u.a. Dieling & Hirschfeld 2000; Schweckendiek & 2 Ich danke Christopher Blake Shedd, Universität Klagenfurt, für die anregenden und klugen Kommentare, unerschöpflichen Materialien und dezent kritischen Hinweise zur Etymologie und zur Phonologie des Türkischen. Viele seiner Anmerkungen wurden dankbar in diesen Text aufgenommen; die bestehenden Mängel sind freilich mir als dem Autor anzurechnen. 3 Der Artikel verwendet im Weiteren den Ausdruck Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) als Überbegriff für DaF und DaZ. Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 133 Schumann 2009) und wird als das zentrale Kriterium für die Verständlichkeit Deutschlernender betrachtet (Hirschfeld 1994). Nicht zuletzt wegen der Folgen, welche die Realisierung des Wortakzents für Rhythmisierung gesprochener Sprache oder für die Reduktion nicht betonter Silben hat, bildet die Arbeit am Akzent etwa den Einstieg in das aktuell weitest verbreitete Lehrbuch zur deutschen Aussprache, Phonothek intensiv (Hirschfeld, Reinke & Stock 2007). Nicht ganz so eindeutig stellt sich die Situation im Englischen dar. Während einerseits der Standpunkt eingenommen wird, korrekte Wortakzentuierung spiele eine bedeutende Rolle in der Verständlichkeit der Äußerungen von Lernenden (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin 2010: 185), wird auch die Ansicht vertreten, der Wortakzent sei für lernersprachliche Äußerungen nicht von Bedeutung (vgl. Diskussion dazu in Rogerson-Revell 2011: 149-152). Darüber hinaus weist das Englisch auf Grund seiner germanisch-romanischen Geschichte auch ein komplexeres Regelwerk zur Akzentplatzierung auf. Außer Zweifel steht allerdings, dass zwischen den hinsichtlich des Wortakzents ähnlichen germanischen Sprachen Deutsch und Englisch einerseits und dem Türkischen andererseits signifikante Unterschiede bestehen. In diesem Essay soll untersucht werden, wo diese Unterschiede liegen und wie sie sich für den Ausspracheunterricht türkischer Lernender von Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) aufbereiten lassen. Dabei werden die phonetischen Mittel zur Realisierung des Akzents im Zentrum des Interesses stehen, eher als die Akzentverteilung. Dass vieles von dem über die Aussprachedidaktik DaF für TürkInnen Gesagten auch für den Englischunterricht gilt, wird dabei impliziert. 2. Aspekte des Wortakzents im Türkischen, Deutschen und Englischen Vignette 2 Ein Versuch zur Wahrnehmung des Wortakzents durch gebildete Muttersprachler- Innen: Fatma und Serdar, zwei türkische Anglistikstudierende auf Austauschsemester in Österreich, lassen sich von mir Wortlisten auf Türkisch vorlesen. Entnommen sind die Wörter dem Kapitel zu Türkisch aus dem Deutschen Aussprachwörterbuch (2010: 217-220). Beim ersten Vorlesen von sechs Wörtern habe ich drei der in der Vorlage angegebenen Akzentstellen verschoben, auf die mir plausibel erscheinenden Silben; etwa für Çetin von der ersten Silbe auf die letzte. Ich bitte um Rückmeldung, welche der Worte korrekt ausgesprochen wurden und welche fehlerhaft. Fatma und Serdar beraten sich und kommen zu keinem klaren Entschluss. Während er mit allen Gregor Chudoba 134 Äußerungen einverstanden ist, meint sie, die a-Laute seien etwas eigenartig gewesen. Die Akzentsetzung ist für beide kein Thema. Bei den nächsten sechs Wörtern lese ich jedes Wort zwei Mal vor mit vorgabenkonformen und abweichenden Akzentsetzungen in unterschiedlicher Reihenfolge - und frage nach der richtigen Realisierung. Sie sind freundlich, aber ein wenig ratlos: Da war doch kein klarer Unterschied? Ausgangspunkt der Überlegungen ist die häufig anzutreffende Behauptung, der türkische Wortakzent liege auf der letzten Silbe. Quellen dazu gibt es von Nemeth (1917: 23) über die vielzitierte Arbeit von Sezer (1981: 61) und das Handbook of the IPA (IPA 1999: 155) bis zum aktuellen Deutschen Aussprachewörterbuch (DAW 2010: 217). Die Formulierung dazu in letztgenanntem Werk lautet, beispielhaft: „Der Akzent liegt bei türkischen Wörtern generell auf der letzten Silbe“ (DAW 2010: 217). Ausnahmen werden gemeinhin für Eigennamen und Fremdwörter, sowie für wenige, nicht betonbare Suffixe eingeräumt; grundsätzlich aber gelte: Türkische Wörter sind endsilbenbetont. Damit würde das Türkische vordergründig etwa dem Französischen mit seinem finalen Akzentsitz ähneln. Dass jedoch für das Französische Charakter, Lage und Verbindlichkeit des Wortakzents nicht unumstritten sind (IPA 1999: 80), lässt fragen, ob auch im Türkischen die Verhältnisse differenzierter als oben behauptet darzustellen sind. Zum ersten ist die Kategorie Wort im Türkischen nicht ohne weiteres mit den entsprechenden Kategorien im Deutschen oder Englischen gleich zu setzen. Das Türkische als agglutinierende Sprache hat einen weitaus geringeren Anteil an isolierten Lexemen je Satz als die flektierenden Sprachen Deutsch und Englisch. In Kombination mit dem Umstand, dass der Akzent sich im komplexen türkischen Wort vom Stamm im Allgemeinen entfernt, anders als die Tendenz im Deutschen und Englischen, kommt dem Akzentsitz, wie er im Lexikon des Simplex eingetragen erscheint, weitaus weniger Bedeutung zu. Während also etwa in dt. 'Berg - 'Berge oder engl. 'mountain - 'mountains die Akzentstelle gleichbleibt, verschiebt sich in türk. 'dağ dağ'lar der Akzent auf das Pluralsuffix; gleiches gilt für türk. bah'çe bahçe'ler (dt. Garten). 4 Noch deutlicher, mit Darstellung des typologischen Unterschieds der drei Sprachen: dt. Land der 'Berge entspricht engl. land of the 'mountains und türk. dağlar'ın ülke'si (Berg-PL-POSS, Land-POSS); dt. in deine 'Berge bzw. engl. into your 'mountains entspräche türk. dağların'a, und dt. von den in deinen 'Bergen befindlichen bzw. engl. of those situated in your 'mountains dem Türkischen dağlarındakiler'den, wo die Akzentstelle im Türkischen jeweils auf das letzte Suffix wandert, während sie im Deutschen und Englischen normkonform auf dem Stamm des Phrasenkerns verbleibt. 4 Die Angabe der Hauptakzentstelle erfolgt hier mittels IPA-Symbol am Silbenanfang, in einer orthographisch-phonetischen Mischnotation. Der hochgestellte vertikale Strich darf v.a. in türkischen Wörtern nicht als Pausenzeichen gedeutet werden. Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 135 Zur wandernden Akzentstelle bei isolierter Produktion mehrgliedriger türkischer Worte kommt hinzu, dass bei Mehrwortäußerungen der Phrasenakzent die einzelnen Wortakzente weitaus an Bedeutung übertrifft. Lewis schreibt dazu: „[G]roup-accent and sentence-accent (i.e. intonation) both override word-accent so completely that some authorities have denied the existence of word-accent altogether” (1967: 21). Darin ähnelt das Türkische abermals dem Französischen und dessen Phrasenakzentuierung, welche die einzelnen Wortakzente weitgehend tilgt (DAW 2010: 149; IPA 1999: 80). Zusätzlich ist der Phrasenakzent im Türkischen, anders als im Deutschen oder Englischen (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin 2010: 221- 225), weniger Informationsmarker denn Kennzeichen von Emphase oder von Kontrasten. Die Platzierung des Phrasenakzents ist im Türkischen dadurch freier wählbar und weniger bestimmt im Sinne einer Diskursregel. Die häufig gebräuchliche Terminologie, „frei“ oder „beweglich“ für den deutschen/ englischen Wortakzent (z.B. Dieling 1992: 116) und „gebunden“ oder „fest“ für den türkischen (Schweckendieck & Schumann 2008: 195), ist hier auf Wort- und auf Phrasenebene potenziell irreführend und gehört um die Unterscheidung zwischen „stabil“ und „mobil“ ergänzt (Moise 2011: 592). Tatsächlich ändert sich der türkische Wortakzent (fest-mobil) mit beinahe jeder Affigierung, während der dt./ engl. (tendenziell frei-stabil) an den Stamm gebunden bleibt; und auf Phrasenebene ist die Akzentsetzung im Türkischen stärker noch als im Dt./ Engl. von der Emphaseabsicht der Sprechenden abhängig und in dieser Hinsicht frei. Der gravierendste, für den Fremdsprachenerwerb folgenreichste Unterschied zwischen den beschriebenen Sprachen, scheint jedoch in den akustischen Korrelaten der behaupteten Prominenzverleihung zu liegen. In Monographien zum Wortakzent oder zur Phonologie der behandelten Sprachen, ebenso wie in kontrastiven Gegenüberstellungen, wird dieser Punkt häufig übergangen oder bestenfalls in Randbemerkungen behandelt; der Eindruck entsteht, es handle sich bei den Mitteln zur Hervorhebung um Universale, die keiner weiteren Erläuterung bedürfen. Beispielhaft, nicht aber erschöpfend genannt seien hier Burzio (Principles of English Stress 1994), Gut (Introduction to English Phonetics and Phonology 2009), das Duden Aussprachewörterbuch (1990) oder Göksel/ Kerslake (Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar 2005) und, weitgehend, die kontrastiven Darstellungen im Deutschen Aussprachewörterbuch (2010) oder bei Tekin (Kontrastive Phonetik Deutsch-Türkisch 2011). Wie sehen nun die akustischen Korrelate des Wortakzents in den behandelten Sprachen aus, welche Mittel werden zur Hervorhebung von Silben innerhalb von Wörtern eingesetzt? Für das Deutsche gilt, ähnlich wie für das Englische, dass akzentuierte Silben länger, lauter und höher gesprochen werden (DAW 2010: 39; Celce-Murcia et al. 2010: 184). Wichtig für beide Sprachen ist dabei auch die Reduktion unbetonter Silben, die eine Gregor Chudoba 136 Zentralisierung und Kürzung der Vokale nach sich zieht, bis hin zur völligen Tilgung. Celce-Murcia et al. schreiben dazu: „It is important to note that the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables is greater in English than in most other languages with the possible exception of German“ (2010: 184). Dass diese Reduktion im Türkischen nicht auftritt, ist die erste Fehlerquelle türkischer Deutsch- oder Englischlernender im Zusammenhang mit dem Wortakzent. Schwachtonige Silben werden folglich überdeutlich artikuliert, besonders auffällig beim Mangel an Schwa- Lauten, aber nicht auf diese Erscheinung beschränkt. Während dt. Guten Morgen in umgangssprachlicher Hochlautung keine E-Laute aufweist ([gu: tn mɔˑɐgŋ]), neigen türkische Lernende zu *[gʊten moɹgen]. Als schwerwiegender muss jedoch erachtet werden, dass der türkische Wortakzent, sofern überhaupt realisiert, sich auch hinsichtlich der anderen Mittel vom Deutschen, respektive Englischen unterscheidet: Die Bündelung von Länge, Lautstärke und relativem Hochton, die für die beiden germanischen Sprachen gilt, ist für das Türkische nicht bindend (Özen 1985: 93). Ähnliches ist beispielhaft für das Tschechische bekannt, das den Druckakzent auf die erste Silbe legt, Silbenlängung aber auch für folgende Silben zulässt, so in tschech. velká (dt. groß, fem.; ['veɫka: ]). Unbetonte Langsilben gibt es im Deutschen zwar auch, so in ['anbe: tn], ['tsa͜ɪtna: ] oder ['bɛttu: x] (also anbeten, zeitnah und Betttuch), nicht jedoch systematisch wie im Tschechischen. Für das Türkische hält Robert Underhill nun fest, der Wortakzent sei „pitch accent rather than dynamic stress“ und „usually on the last syllable of the word“ (1986: 11). Noch einen Schritt weiter geht Goeffrey Lewis, der der häufig erhobenen Behauptung von der türkischen Endsilbenbetonung (beispielhaft IPA 1999: 155; DAW 2010: 217) widerspricht und eine Initialbetonung postuliert, allerdings unter Einführung einer Unterscheidung von „stress“ und „accent“: “The simple rule is that the stress falls on the first syllable but that there is a more obvious tonic accent, i.e., a rise in the pitch of the voice, usually on the last syllable“ (Lewis 1982: 24). Die Hervorhebung durch Lautstärke bezeichnet er somit als „stress“, die Hervorhebung durch Tonhöhe als „accent“. Diese Unterscheidung zwischen dynamischem und musikalischem Akzent im Türkischen trifft schon Kaare Grønbech in seinem packenden Überblick über die Diskussion zum türkischen Wortakzent von 1900 bis 1940, in dem er zusammenfassend, ein wenig überraschend, feststellt: „Es gibt im Türkischen keinen Akzent“ (1940: 378). Vielmehr seien die beiden Merkmale mehr oder minder frei und unabhängig voneinander verteilbar und Turkologen hätten, unter der Annahme, dass der Wortakzent gleichsam ein Universal darstelle, jeweils vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Ausgangssprachen eher einen Initialakzent (dynamisch) oder einen Finalakzent (musikalisch) identifiziert. Mit seiner Ablehnung eines Wortakzents im Sinne des Englischen oder Deutschen zeigt sich Grønbech konform mit der bereits eingangs zitierten Behauptung von Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 137 Lewis, „some authorities have denied the existence of word-accent altogether” (1967: 21). Wenn man Grønbech folgt, so erklärt sich, was Stephan Unterberger zu Liedtexten im Türkischen schreibt: „Die echte Reimbindung ist denn auch eher frei, ebenso wie die Metrik. Dies hängt wiederum mit der relativ freien Betonung im Türkischen zusammen, die nicht wie z.B. bei den zweisilbigen Wörtern im Deutschen eindeutig auf der ersten oder zweiten Silbe liegt, sondern ‚schwebend‘ ist“ (1994: 7). Diese „schwebende Betonung“ erlaubt eine metrische Behandlung von Liedtexten, die im Deutschen oder Englischen undenkbar wäre, oder aber als progressive Musik oder gar als Parodie gedeutet würde. Man stelle sich vor, die österreichische Hymne würde gesungen als * Land der Ber'ge: , Land am Stro'me: , oder das Vereinigte Königreich sänge * God save our gra'ciou: s Queen, long live our no'ble: Queen. Im Türkischen ist dies aber möglich, nicht nur im İstiklal Marşı, der türkischen Hymne, deren Wortgrenzen aufgrund der Setzung zur Musik für Sprachunkundige nicht identifizierbar sind, da Längungen und Pausierungen scheinbar frei erfolgen, auch innerhalb von Worten. Auch das unten stehende Tini mini hanım (Unterberger 1994: 76) kann als Beispiel dienen: Die Betonung im gradtaktigen Volkslied erfolgt auf 1/ 8 und 3/ 8, wodurch sich Wortakzentuierungen ergeben, die nicht im Einklang stehen mit den gängigen Behauptungen zum Türkischen. Dass ein Volkslied der muttersprachlichen Intuition entgegensteht, kann aber ausgeschlossen werden es erhärtet sich die Annahme, das Türkische habe keinen verbindlichen dynamischen Akzent. 5 5 Der abgedruckte deutsche Text ist als freie Übersetzung oder Nachdichtung zu verstehen. Eine stärker wörtlich ausgerichtete Übersetzung könnte lauten: Elfenmädchen, nach dir verlangt meine Seele. Die Pfirsichbäume, die Vielfalt an Blüten auf ihren Spitzen. Mehr zum Lied, inklusive Aufnahmen, ist im angegebenen Buch zu finden oder z.B. unter http: / / www.shira.net/ music/ lyrics/ tini-mini-hanim.htm (Zugriff 2016 02 19). Gregor Chudoba 138 Abbildung 1: Tini Mini © Unterberger (1994: 76) Ein Wort soll zur Besprechung hervorgehoben werden: das şeftali 6 (dt. Pfirsich) vom Beginn der zweiten Zeile. Isoliert ausgesprochen als ['ʃeftaː˦liˑ], mit einem leichten dynamischen Akzent auf der ersten Silbe, einer Länge auf der zweiten und einem schwachen Hochton nebst einer mittleren Länge auf der letzten, hat es die drei Merkmale, die im deutschen Wortakzent auf einer Silbe gebündelt zu liegen kommen, auf drei Silben gleichmäßig verteilt. 7 In der Setzung zur Musik bestätigt sich diese Verteilung weitgehend: Şeftali erhält hier durch die Musik eine dynamische Erstsilbenbetonung und zusätzlich zum Hochton, der schon auf der zweiten Silbe einsetzt, eine Längung auf der letzten Silbe. Würden die üblichen Annahmen zur türkischen Wortakzentuierung zutreffen, läge der dynamische Akzent an der falschen Stelle, das Wort entspräche einem Deutschen [*pfiɐzɪç'eː]. Folgt man jedoch Lewis (1967) und Grønbech (1940, s.o.), so entsteht keine Reibung das Lied bleibt singbar; und mit der Popularität des Liedes als Indikator gehen wir davon aus, dass kein Missverhältnis zwischen 6 Şeftali ist zwar ein Lehnwort aus dem Persischen, worauf auch die Vokalstruktur hinweist, die nicht der türkischen Vokalharmonie folgt. Das für şeftali Gesagte gilt jedoch etwa auch für das türkische Erbwort ağaçları (dt. Bäume) im nächsten Takt, wie für alle mehrsilbigen Wörter, mit denen im Lied ein Takt beginnt. Şeftali bot sich als der besser genießbare Begriff hier zur Besprechung an. 7 Die Längenangaben für die zweite und dritte Silbe hier sind keinesfalls phonematisch zu verstehen. Vokallänge hat, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, im Türkischen keine distinktive Funktion. Auch wären für die zweite und dritte Silbe andere, unmarkierte Längenrealisierungen möglich. Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 139 Vertonung des Textes und naiver Intuition zum türkischen Wortakzent besteht. Zusammenfassend für diesen Abschnitt soll festgehalten werden: Die akustischen Korrelate für die Hervorhebung von Silben sind im Türkischen und Deutschen unterschiedlicher Natur. Im Deutschen werden phonetische Mittel auf eine Silbe konzentriert, während das Türkische ihre Verteilung auf mehrere Silben erlaubt. 8 Damit in Zusammenhang steht die relativ größere Prominenz der betonten Silbe im Deutschen im Vergleich mit dem Türkischen. Zum Deutschen Analoges gilt für das Englische. Zusätzlich ist der Wortakzent im Türkischen weitaus stärker von Emphase und Phrasenstruktur abhängig, innerhalb des stark affigierten Wortes kann er zudem freier bewegt werden als das Deutsche mit seiner Tendenz zur Stammsilbenbindung es zulässt. Die Konsequenzen dieser Unterschiede sollen im anschließenden Abschnitt diskutiert werden. 3. Diskussion - Interferenzen Die korrekte Realisierung des Wortakzents wird für den Erwerb von Deutsch als Fremdsprache als das wichtigste phonetische Einzelmerkmal für verständliches Sprechen angenommen (Hirschfeld 1994: 158). Das liegt nicht nur an der betonten Silbe selbst, sondern auch an den mit der Akzentsetzung in Wort und Satz verbundenen Folgen: Schwächung von unbetonten Silben im Wort, sowie Komprimierung und Beschleunigung der Silben, die im Satz zwischen den Akzenten zu liegen kommen. Das Deutsche unterscheidet sich auch hierin als akzentzählende Sprache von dem silbenzählenden Zugang des Türkischen, der eine Gleichbehandlung von Silben bewirkt. Nun sind aber im Deutschen besonders Funktionswörter und Flexionsendungen im Normalfall unbetont, die als Anzeiger wichtiger grammatischer Kategorien (Genus, Kasus, Tempus) im Unterricht besondere Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Das Bemühen um grammatikalische Korrektheit führt bei Lernenden jedoch zu intonatorisch und rhythmisch inkorrekten, weil überdeutlichen und fälschlich vereinheitlichten Äußerungen (Schweckendieck & Schumann 2008: 194-195). Überdeutlich sind hierbei die nichtreduzierten unbetonten Silben, während die betonten Silben im Deutschen von Türken mit relativ undeutlicher Konsonanten- und Vokalrealsierung artikuliert werden (Özen 1985, Fußnote 40-41). 8 Die von Alfred Schmitt (1924) eingeführte Unterscheidung zwischen zentraliserendem und dezentralisierendem Wortakzent, die diese Tendenz zur Bündelung der phonetischen Merkmale beschreibt, taucht in neueren Phonologien nicht mehr auf. Das Deutsche wäre demnach stark, das Türkische schwach zentralisierend oder dezentralisierend. Gregor Chudoba 140 Allgemein formuliertes Anliegen des Ausspracheunterrichts ist es, die Akzentregeln der Ausgangssprache durch jene der Zielsprache zu ersetzen. Im vorliegenden Fall nun tritt zur Interferenz der Sprachsysteme auch die Irreführung durch die Terminologie: Mit Akzent wird im Deutschen, respektive Englischen, und im Türkischen zweierlei bezeichnet, es handelt sich gewissermaßen um einen faux ami. Diese Mehrdeutigkeit gilt es zuerst auf Seiten der Sprachbeschreibung und bei Lehrenden und AutorInnen zu erfassen, ehe Unterrichtsangebote für Lernende gemacht werden. Die Strategie hat also einen Schritt vor dem DaF/ DaZ-Unterricht anzusetzen, gleichsam in Anwendung des Unterrichtsprinzips „Perzeption vor Produktion“ (Dieling & Hirschfeld 2000: 47-48; Schweckendiek & Schumann 2008: 189) auf einer Metaebene. Sind dem Lehrenden die Unterschiede der Strukturen und der Terminologien klar, können angeleitete Übungen, wie in Abschnitt 4 beschrieben, DaF-Lernenden Hilfe bieten. 4. Übungsformen Vignette 3 Güler, auf Erasmussemester an der Universität Klagenfurt, studiert BWL und nimmt zur Verbesserung ihrer Englischkenntnisse an einem Aussprachekurs teil. Zur Einübung der Wortakzentuierung spricht im Kreis jede ihren Namen und schlägt bei der Akzentsilbe auf den Tisch. Wir klopfen (BAMM) und sprechen also reihum den eigenen Namen: BAMM/ Gre-gor; An-BAMM/ dre-a; Christ- BAMM/ tophe; Gü-ler, Lächeln, Schulterzucken, BAMM. Für die Vermittlung von Satzintonation und Phrasenakzentuierung ist Brummen als Zwischenschritt zwischen Hören und Sprechen besonders angebracht (Cauneau 1992, 47; Schweckendiek & Schumann 2008, 199). Beispielhafte Übungen, die sich auch zur Veranschaulichung der phonetischen Mittel zur Akzentsetzung im Deutschen eignen, finden sich in Evelyn Freys Kursbuch Phonetik (Frey 1995, 23-30). Worte werden dabei vorgesprochen und vorgebrummt, sind von Lernenden nachzubrummen, in einer Wortliste nach Brummmuster zu identifizieren, und dergleichen mehr. Das lässt sich im Unterricht schrittweise ausbauen, bis zu Übungen wie: Übung 4.1: Worte und Sätze brummen Brummen Sie einen der [Sätze aus der folgenden Liste]. Die anderen Kursteilnehmer müssen raten, welchen Satz Sie gebrummt haben. (Sie müssen es so lange versuchen, bis die anderen den richtigen Satz geraten haben.) (Frey 1995, 25) [Runde Klammer gemäß Original] Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 141 Mit dem Brummen wird die Konzentration von Lautstärke und Tonhöhe auf eine Silbe deutlich gemacht, auch Silbenlänge wird hörbar. Eine weitere Übung, die in Ganzkörperarbeit den dynamischen Akzent übt, ist ähnlich der in obiger Vignette geschilderten: Übung 4.2: Akzente stampfen Die Lernenden bilden mit der Lehrenden einen Kreis. Alle denken sich ein zweisilbiges, anfangsbetontes Wort aus. Nun wird gemeinsam ein Trochäus gestampft, dazu spricht reihum jeweils eine ihr Wort vor, worauf alle im Chor zum Takt passend das Wort wiederholen. Deutliche Projektion der Stimme ist erforderlich und muss eingefordert werden. Kann mit endbetonten Zweisilbern und gestampftem Jambus wiederholt werden, bei sehr guten Gruppen auch mit dreisilbigen Worten. In der letzten Variation ist das Scheitern Teil des Plans; die Koordination von Dreiertakt und zwei Beinen mit antiphonischem Sprechen ist sehr anspruchsvoll. Ein Lied, welches das Verständnis von Tonhöhe und Dynamik übt, ist das Lied vom Tomatensalat. Hier wird spielerisch der Wortakzent über das fünfsilbige Wort hinwegbewegt, zumeist steigt mit dem Taktbeginn, der betonten Stelle im Takt, auch die Melodie an, entsprechend der relativen Tonhöhe auf betonten Silben. Übung 4.3: Lied mit Akzentverschiebung Abbildung 2: Tomatensalat Lernende bewegen sich auch gerne zu diesem Lied, in Schreit- oder Kreistänzen mit deutlicher Betonung des Schritts zu Taktbeginn. Allgemein sind Bewegungs-, Klatsch- und Klopfübungen willkommene Gelegenheiten zur Integration von holistischem Ausspracheunterricht und zur Einbindung von Körperarbeit in den Sprachunterricht. Weitere Übungen dieser Art Gregor Chudoba 142 finden sich in Hirschfeld & Reinke (2009) oder Schweckendiek & Schumann (2008). Ein weiteres probates Mittel zur Veranschaulichung der Vielfalt von Akzentmustern im Deutschen stellen Familien- oder Fantasienamen dar, ebenso wie Ortsnamen. Das möge folgendes Beispiel verdeutlichen, welches als Wechselspiel für zwei Lernende gedacht ist. Übung 4.4: Wechselspiel mit integrierter Landeskunde Abbildung 3: Übung zum Wortakzent Die PartnerInnen verfügen über Angaben, bei denen jeweils die fehlenden Akzente angegeben sind. Wechselweise sollen nun die Städte vorgelesen bzw. die Akzentmarkierungen eingetragen werden. Übung 4.5: Namen mit Silbenlängung Rufen Sie einE KollegIn nach folgendem Muster, Alexander beginnt: Alexander: „Alexander ruft He: lga.“ Helga: „Helga ruft Gü: nther.“ Günther: „Günther ruft A: llan.“ Sprechen Sie Ihren eigenen Namen und den der Gerufenen besonders deutlich. Diese Übung stellt eine Variation der in Vignette 3 geschilderten dar, allerdings wird hier nicht die dynamische Betonung verstärkt, sondern die Längung der Akzentsilbe besonders hervorgehoben. Die Lernenden sollten einander dabei besser kreuz und quer rufen als in vorhersehbarer Reihenfolge, um eine stärkere Konzentration aller Gruppenmitglieder zu erzielen. Eine Variation mit besonderer Hervorhebung der Rufterz ist auch möglich. Dadurch wird das dritte phonetische Mittel zur Akzentrealisierung im Deutschen verdeutlicht und geübt, der Hochton. Übungen 1 bis 5 zeigen, wie unterschiedliche Aspekte der Wortakzentuierung im Deutschen, und analog im Englischen, geübt werden Şeftali - Der Wortakzent im Türkischen 143 können. Damit soll für Lernende mit türkischer Ausgangssprache erreicht werden, dass ein Verständnis für die akustischen Korrelate der Akzentuierung entwickelt wird, sowie dafür, dass diese Mittel im Deutschen in Kombination anzuwenden sind. Die Regeln zur Setzung des Wortakzents sind, wo sinnvoll, im Anschluss zu erarbeiten. 5. Zusammenfassung Absicht dieses Beitrags war es, zu zeigen, wie die scheinbar selbstverständliche Verwendung des Terminus Wortakzent zur Beschreibung des Deutschen und Englischen einerseits und des Türkischen andererseits dazu führt, dass ein Missverständnis einzementiert wird: dass nämlich die bezeichneten Phänomene einander gleich seien. Tatsächlich scheint das Türkische keinen ausgeprägten Wortakzent im Sinne des Deutschen oder Englischen zu kennen. Vielmehr überlagert die diskursive oder emphatische Funktion des Phrasenakzents im Türkischen den Wortakzent weitgehend. Zusätzlich sind die phonetischen Mittel, die zur Hervorhebung von Silben im Deutschen und Englischen gebündelt eingesetzt werden, im Türkischen disparat einsetzbar, so dass innerhalb eines Wortes mehrere Silben unterschiedliche Formen der Markierung erfahren können. Wird dieses Verständnis von türkischen DaF-Lernenden auch im Deutschen angewandt, resultiert daraus ein insignifikantes Akzentmuster, das in Verbindung mit den zwischensprachlichen Unterschieden rhythmischer Natur zu schwer verständlichen Intonationsweisen führt. Zur Abhilfe werden, nach entsprechender Sensibilisierung der Lehrenden, Übungen vorgeschlagen, die nach entsprechenden Hörübungen durch Brummen, Singen und Körperarbeit die einzelnen Dimensionen der deutschen Akzentbildung deutlich machen und die weitgehend verbindliche Kombinierung der phonetischen Mittel zur Akzentsetzung einüben. 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Hirschfeld, Ursula. 1994. Untersuchungen zur phonetischen Verständlichkeit Deutschlernender. Frankfurt: Hector. Hirschfeld, Ursula & Kerstin Reinke. 2009. 33 Aussprachespiele. Stuttgart: Klett. Hirschfeld, Ursula, Kerstin Reinke & Eberhard Stock. 2013. Phonothek intensiv. München: Klett-Langenscheidt. Kern, Friederike. 2013. Rhythmus und Kontrast im Türkischdeutschen. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Lewis, Geoffrey L. 1967. Turkish Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Geoffrey L. 1982. (13 th print.; 1 st print. 1953). Turkish. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton. Moise, Maria Ileana. 2011. Phonetische Merkmale des Rumäniendeutschen im Vergleich zum Standarddeutschen und Rumänischen. IDV-Magazin 84: 589-600. Németh, Julius (Gyula). 1917. Türkische Grammatik. Berlin & Leipzig: Sammlung Göschen. Özen, Erhan. 1985. Untersuchungen zu einer kontrastiven Phonetik Türkisch - Deutsch. (Forum Phoneticum, Bd. 30). Hamburg: Buske Verlag. Rogerson-Revell, Pamela. 2011. English Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching. London: Continuum. Rolffs, Songül. 2010. Türkisch. Deutsches Aussprachwörterbuch, 217-220. Schmitt, Alfred. 1924. Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Akzentlehre. Heidelberg: Winter Schweckendiek, Jürgen & Franziska-Sophie Schumann. 2008. Phonetik im DaZ- Unterricht. In Susan Kaufmann, Erich Zehnder, Elisabeth Vanderheiden & Winfried Frank (eds.), Fortbildung für Kursleitende Deutsch als Zweitsprache, Band 2, Didaktik - Methodik: 180-232. Ismaning: Hueber. Sezer, Engin. 1981. On non-final stress in Turkish. Journal of Turkish Studies 5: 61-69. Tekin, Özlem. 2011. Kontrastive Phonetik Deutsch-Türkisch. IDV-Magazin 84: 601- 615. Underhill, Robert. 1986. Turkish. In Dan Isaac Slobin & Karl Zimmer (eds.), Studies in Turkish Linguistics: 7-22. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Unterberger, Stefan. 1994. Lieder der Türkei. Innsbruck: Helbling. Ursula Doleschal Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 1 1. Introduction Allan James is not only a scholar of English linguistics, but has also enlightened generations of students about multilingualism - a phenomenon which is characteristic both for Allan’s former homeland, Wales (see James 2010, 2011), and his later one, Carinthia. It was thanks to Allan that the special interest group “Multilingualism” was founded at the University of Klagenfurt in 1999 and had its heyday under his guidance (see http: / / www.uni-klu.ac.at/ mehrsprachigkeit/ inhalt/ 1.htm). I therefore dedicate the following pages on bilingualism in Carinthia to Allan. Nowadays, Austria is not very likely to be conceived of as a “multilingual” or even a “multiethnic state”, in contrast to the Austrian- Hungarian empire, which was an example of the latter. Nevertheless, contemporary Austria has its roots in multilingual Austria-Hungary and has therefore inherited some vestiges of its former diversity. One of these remnants is the bilingual area in Southern Carinthia, where a Slovenespeaking population has survived to this day. Although this minority has attracted much attention for (language-)political reasons, little is known about their actual language use. There are practically no publications on real-language data, neither from dialectology (a recent exception is Neweklowsky 2013) nor from the point of view of multilingualism. In this article, I would like to remedy this unsatisfactory situation by presenting, among other relevant facts, data collected in research seminars and small projects at the Institute of Slavonic studies. In this way, I hope to shed some light on the current situation and state of bilingualism in the Austrian region of Carinthia. I will first give a brief overview of the language situation (2), which is followed by a presentation of research on language use (3). In 3.1, research relying on interviews and self-reported data will be presented, while 3.2 will focus on data-driven studies. 1 I would like to thank Tom Priestly for critically commenting on an earlier version of this article and for giving valuable advice and input. All faults are of course mine. I am also grateful to Alexander Onysko for his thorough editing. Ursula Doleschal 146 2. Language situation Official Carinthia (along with the majority of its inhabitants) usually defines itself as “German-speaking”, i.e. being Carinthian means that German is the language used in everyday situations. The latest effect of this attitude is the amendment of the regional constitution by the sentence, “Die Landessprache ist Deutsch” (the language of the province is German) in February 2017. However, this current self-identification is neither backed up by historical facts nor by territorial or population development. Firstly, the historical territory of Carinthia was larger before World War I, but after 1920, parts of Carinthia were incorporated into Italy and the Yugoslav state (the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), and the largest part became part of the new Austrian state. Thus, what is nowadays called Carinthia in German does not comprise the whole historical territory of the land. Indeed the part that became Yugoslav after World War I and is now part of Slovenia continues to be called Carinthia (Koroška) in Slovene. Therefore, the concept that Slovenes (and Slovene-speaking people) have of Carinthia is somewhat different from the one held by German-speaking people (and especially German-speaking Carinthians). 2 Secondly, from the point of view of historical settlement, Carinthia was colonized by Slavic tribes in the 7th century and only some time later by the Germanic Bavarians. In the 9th century, the area became part of the Frankish empire, and subsequently the Germanization of the Slavic population started and is still continuing to the present day (cf. Fischer 1980; Maurer- Lausegger 2006, 2016). Carinthian Slovenes used to live in a situation of diglossia with German as the H-variety and Slovene as the L-variety. With economic changes during the 20 th century, especially extensive commuting to German-speaking jobs as well as the advent of widespread access to radio and television which ultimately brought German right into the home, this situation gave way to general bilingualism, so that nowadays all Carinthian Slovenes are fully bilingual in German and Slovene (Priestly 1994; Maurer- Lausegger 2006: 173, 2016; Zupančič 1999: 191). Official statistics have suggested a constant decrease in the use of Slovene since the middle of the 19th century. While in 1850, around one third of Carinthia's population declared themselves as speakers of Slovene, nowadays only about 2% do so (14,010 people in the latest, 2001, census). 3 Unofficial estimates, however, suggest that at that time more than 35,000 people were able to speak the local dialect and/ or standard Slovene but 2 Incidentally, the same is true for the historical territory of Styria, a large part of which belongs to Slovenia and is also called Styria (Štajerska) in Slovene, a fact unknown to most Austrians. 3 There are no more recent data on the number of speakers available because, since 2011, the census has not collected data on language use any more. Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 147 preferred not to declare themselves officially as speakers, and about 60,000 understood one and/ or the other (Priestly 2000: 228, 2014: 26; Busch 2001: 119-120; Zupančič 1999: 225; Reiterer 1996: 150). Such behaviour is due to the historically hostile attitude of the majority population of Carinthia towards people speaking Slovene. This hostile attitude has its roots in the 19th century when, in the wake of nationalism, both Slovene and German nationalist organizations began their political struggle for national integrity and self-determination and language became a crucial discriminatory feature. Polarization continually worsened until World War II and has only recently begun to ease back somewhat (cf. the joint book by former opponents Josef Feldner and Marjan Sturm, 2007 4 ). Nevertheless, an anti-Slovene attitude is alive among German-speaking Carinthians, which, in contradistinction to former times, is nowadays displayed mostly in private. 5 Furthermore, the traditionally strong rightwing parties in Carinthia, FPÖ, BZÖ and FPK, like to base their campaigns on the old antagonisms (see Priestly 1989 and 2014 for an account). The Austrian state guarantees certain language rights to the Slovene minority that are laid down in a special law (Volksgruppengesetz, BGBl.Nr. 118/ 1976, see Fischer 1980: 241-271) and are also corroborated by Austria's signing and ratifying the Charter of Regional and Minority Languages of the European Council (for an evaluation see Doleschal 2012a). These relate in particular to bilingual topographic signs, bilingual schooling and the use of Slovene in public offices (such as local administration, law courts, etc.) in a well-defined area of Southern Carinthia. But these rights are enacted poorly for the reasons just mentioned above. 3. The Slovene minority: Identity and language use The Slovene identity is very much bound to the language, even so much that the journalist Mirko Bogataj states, “when language dies, the ethnic group dies, too” (Bogataj 2008: 431). Language use is the most salient feature of identification with the Slovene ethnic group (cf., for example, Zavratnik Zimic 1998; Zupančič 1999: 231). But it is not the only feature: in order to feel 4 Josef Feldner was ‘Obmann’ (director) of the ultra-right-wing Kärntner Heimatdienst [Carinthian Homeland Service], and Marjan Sturm the director of one of the leading Carinthian Slovenian organizations, the Zveza Centralnih Slovenskih Organizacij na Koroškem [Association of Central Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia]. On the gradual rapprochement between these two, see the section “Kärntner Konsensgruppe” at the link https: / / de.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Kärntner_Heimatdienst. An informative review of the book can be found at http: / / diepresse.com/ home/ politik/ innenpolitik/ 335777/ politisches-Buch_Zwei-die-uber-ihren-Schatten-sprangen. 5 This can be seen from standing phrases such as: “as if they did not know German”, uttered as comments to news about, e.g., bilingual signs. Ursula Doleschal 148 Slovene, one should also identify with Slovene culture. 6 At the same time, most Carinthian Slovenes feel loyal to Austria (Zupančič 1999: 235; Priestly, MacKinnie & Hunter 2009) and therefore do not see themselves as a national minority but as an ethnic group belonging to the Austrian nation (Reiterer 1996: 169). Origin is another important factor of the Carinthian Slovene identity, meaning that one's family has a Slovene tradition. Thus, language and origin are the most prominently shared features of a Carinthian Slovene identity (Medvešek 2002; Zupančič 1999: 234). As for language, knowing and using Slovene is not, however, enough for a Slovene identity: there are people (mostly elderly ones) who speak a Slovene dialect with their peers but who would not use this dialect with the younger generation and would not call themselves Slovene either (Brunner 1988; Vavti 2007, 2009). But people who do not know or use the language would not call themselves Slovene, even if their family background is Slovene and their parents might speak the language and even identify with Slovene. 7 3.1 Who speaks Slovene to whom and when? For a long time (practically from 1920, the year of the Carinthian plebiscite, until very recently) the use of Slovene was not functional 8 in Austria and did not have any prestige at all. This is certainly one of the reasons why the language was abandoned by so many speakers during the 20th century. However, this situation changed in the 1990s when Slovenia gained independence from Yugoslavia and underwent rapid economic development, ultimately becoming a member of the European Union in 2004. As such, the new state is now seen as a neighbour that is also felt to be equal (cf., e.g., Polainer 2009: 93). These new circumstances have led to a continual rise in interest in Slovene language courses, starting at nursery school and ending with courses for adults (Volavšek Kurasch 2001). The numbers of primary school registrations for bilingual classes are especially telling. Let me stress here 6 What this exactly means, is usually not explained (cf. Doleschal 2009a for discussion). Ogris (2009: 82-83) has found out that this means mostly to be active in Carinthian Slovene cultural organizations (similarly also Österreichische Rektorenkonferenz 1989: 105). 7 However, there are exceptions, cf. the interviews in Polainer 2009. 8 By “functional” I mean the necessity to speak Slovene instead of German (cf. Maurer- Lausegger 2016: 93). Of course, Slovene dialects were functional within Slovenespeaking communities and the standard language in church, but with the continual rise of bilingualism this functionality has been transformed into a symbolic and emotional one. Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 149 that bilingual schooling was established after World War II in order to give Carinthian Slovenes the possibility of schooling in their own language, albeit their mother tongue. Nowadays, however, bilingual classes are largely used as a means for the acquisition of a second language by children from German-speaking families (Sandrieser 2013; Doleschal 2009b, Maurer- Lausegger 2016: 93). Registration for classes taught in German and Slovene reached an absolute low in 1976/ 77 when only 13.45% of the children in the bilingual area were registered. From that time on numbers increased, attaining 44.58% in 2013 (which equals 2,000 pupils) (Bogataj 2008: 317; Sandrieser 2013; Sandrieser & Weinfurtner 2014: 21, 51). At the same time, this does not mean that competence in Slovene has risen; indeed, the opposite is rather the case (cf. Reiterer 2000; MacKinnie & Priestly 2004). The amount of Slovene that children know when they start school varies considerably. According to reports by primary school teachers, 15.31 % of the children attending the first class of bilingual schooling in 2013 had a “normal command” of Slovene, 18.97 % had “some knowledge” of the language and 65.72 % did not know any Slovene at all. If we compare these figures with 1980, when 43.05 % were native speakers, 25.69% had little knowledge and only 31.25 % had no knowledge of Slovene at all, we see a clear tendency (Sandrieser & Weinfurtner 2014: 62-63): what we are observing is a continual loss of (natural) first language acquisition accompanied by a continual rise in second and/ or foreign language acquisition of Slovene (Doleschal 2009b). For the language varieties used, this means a shift from dialect to standard language. Such a shift is a crucial change for an originally rural ethnic group (like the Carinthian Slovenes traditionally were). One might be tempted to interpret this as a consequence of social and societal change that has occurred within the minority (Reiterer 1996) but although loss of dialect is also a side-effect of higher education and of urbanization, it is ultimately much more due to the fact of language acquisition in an institutional setting. However, this shift is also crucial from the point of view of Carinthian society as a whole. In Carinthia, local (German) dialects are highly esteemed and there are even university students who would deny knowing the standard language or feel awkward if they are called upon to give a presentation in “pure” standard German which seems alien to them and not something they would identify with. In a similar vein, some Carinthian Slovenes believe that knowing a Carinthian Slovene dialect is the crucial characteristic of belonging, not knowledge of Slovene as such (i.e. only the standard language) (cf. Busch 2008: 60; Ogris 2009: 80-81). The standard language is very much identified with the written code in Carinthia (“nach der Schrift sprechen”, ‘to speak in accordance with the written language’) and has no potential for a feeling of intimacy. On the other hand, Carinthian Slovenes associate the knowledge of standard Slovene with ethnic belonging Ursula Doleschal 150 (cf. Busch 2008: 61; Polainer 2009: 68-69, 79, 108). While the prestige of Slovene among all Carinthians, whether Slovene or German speakers, has risen substantially in terms of the standard language, the attitude towards Carinthian Slovene dialects has remained the same as before: low prestige. This can be seen, for example, in interviews conducted by Polainer (2009: 60-64, 80; cf. also Priestly 1990). Let us examine in which domains Slovene is used nowadays. In the following, I will mostly rely on research dating from the 1990s onwards in the light of the above-mentioned historical changes associated with the independence and democratization of Slovenia in 1991. There are quite a few studies on self-reported language use which have either been carried out with the help of questionnaires or interviews (e.g. Zavratnik Zimic 1998; Zupančič 1999; Nećak-Lük 2002; Maurer-Lausegger 1993; Priestly 2003). Although carried out on different populations and with differing numbers of interviewees, these studies show a rather homogeneous picture: as an overall generalization, Slovene is the language of the home and German the language of public use. What is more, the use of Slovene is decreasing among the younger generations. Several factors are responsible for the use of Slovene or German. Firstly, it has to be said that Southern Carinthia, where most Carinthian Slovenes live, has a mixed population in the sense that there are almost no municipalities where Slovenes prevail, German speakers being the majority in every single municipality but one (Zell Pfarre/ Sele Fara, cf. Bauer 2003: 62-67). Since the German speaking population is usually monolingual and since German is the official state language of Austria, it is clear why the public sphere does not favour the use of Slovene, although Slovenes theoretically do have guaranteed rights to language use in public offices, as mentioned above (section 2.). But the surveys cited show that these laws are not regularly enacted, either because officials do not know Slovene or because Slovene clients prefer to speak German themselves in order not to cause trouble or because they know the relevant terminology better in German (Nećak Lük 2002: 69-70; Zavratnik Zimic 1998: 59-60; 116-117). Language attitude plays a role here, too: there used to be a general rule that Carinthian Slovenes only spoke Slovene in public to those who they knew as speakers of Slovene or if others addressed them in Slovene, and they avoided speaking Slovene in the presence of people they did not know (Minnich 1988: 139; Priestly 1989: 85, quoted in Maurer-Lausegger 1993: 94), except in outspokenly Slovene institutions. This, of course, meant a substantial restriction on the possibilities of using Slovene, which was objectively due to the presence of a monolingual German population and subjectively due to a defensive attitude among Slovenes whose experiences with their German-speaking fellow citizens had often been traumatic in the course of history (cf. Merkač 1986: 225 qtd. in Madrian 2008: 47) and Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 151 continue to be unfavourable. The younger generations, however, are no longer strictly following the rule of not speaking Slovene in the presence of people they do not know or in groups including monolingual German speakers (see below 2.2). Still, there were and still are some domains beside the family where Carinthian Slovenes report on using Slovene predominantly: the church and Slovene cultural associations and events (Nećak Lük 2002: 69-70; Zupančič 1999: 167-171; Doleschal 2009b). So, this situation is an example of how language use is conditioned by sociolinguistic domains (in the sense of Fishman). In this respect another factor has to be considered. For at least two decades, a wide choice of German-language TV channels has been available which broadcast 24 hours a day. There is no such equivalent in Slovene, and thus German has ultimately made its way into the home and into the family. This means that there are no longer any domains belonging exclusively to the Slovene language (Busch 1996: 144-150). Nowadays, Carinthian Slovenes may choose between German and Slovene in any in-group situation (cf. the data in Zupančič 1999: 159-171). There is also a choice to speak “mixed” (ibid.), i.e. to use both languages alternately. What both interviewers and interviewees mean by such an answer is, however, never explained in the literature. They might either be thinking of codeswitching, i.e. mixing the two languages within an utterance, but just as well of using the two languages alternately according to topic or occasion. 9 In order to clarify this point, the investigation of actual language use is of vital importance (see below, 3.2). The alternating use of German and Slovene is also brought about by the fact that Carinthian Slovenes often intermarry with monolingual German speakers. The existence of such mixed families has to be considered as a further factor. As has been shown by Nećak Lük (2002) and Zupančič (1999: 159-180), the fact that one of the spouses does not speak Slovene (although he or she might know it passively) has a great impact on the use of the language both by the other partner and especially by the children. While in purely Slovene families, about 80% of the children are reported to speak Slovene to each other, it is only about 40% in mixed families (Zupančič 1999: 162). However, as Zupančič stresses, mixed marriages do not automatically lead to language loss (1999: 191), as is often feared by ethnically conscious Slovenes (cf. Zavratnik Zimic 1998: 109). Another factor that conditions the use of Slovene and/ or German is the interlocutor. All interviewees reported that they speak more Slovene with the older generation (their parents and/ or grandparents) than with their 9 Another interpretation might be the use of “mixed language” in the sense of the Windischentheorie, see Priestly (1997) for a presentation. Ursula Doleschal 152 peers and their children (Nećak Lük 2002: 67; Zupančič 1999: 161). Still, interviewees also reported that their children speak more Slovene to each other than they do with their neighbours or friends. Once again, this fact reveals the status of Slovene as a language of the home. Finally, language use is also dependent on the topic being spoken about. Apart from this previous research into habits and factors of using Slovene, what is really needed are investigations into language use with the help of participant observation (as, e.g., Minnich 1998; Maurer-Lausegger 1993). Furthermore, recordings of live speech are necessary as the systematics of language use can hardly be described by self-reported data. Although data have been collected for a long time - most prominently by Tom Priestly, see, e.g., Priestly, McKinnie and Hunter (2009) and Herta Maurer-Lausegger (e.g. 1993, 1995, http: / / www.kwfilm.com/ ), - analyses exemplifying language choice, register and codeswitching are practically not available. The Institute of Slavonic Studies at Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt has therefore started a series of small research projects as well as doctoral and master theses that concentrate on language attitudes and language use in its various manifestations. In these projects, we try to find out about changing attitudes and values towards Slovene and to gain insight into the way the Slovene language is used in different domains. 2.2 Field research: Observation, recordings and interviews (language biographies) As mentioned in the previous section, the question of how Carinthian Slovenes alternate between German and Slovene when they report on speaking “mixed” remains open. 10 Since the topic of codeswitching and language mixing is prominent in the lay discussions on the status of Carinthian Slovene, empirical research has to be carried out with recordings and transcriptions in order to provide linguists with solid data. The material referred to in this section has been collected in research seminars and small projects from 2004 onwards. Students have carried out the recordings among their acquaintances, thus making the investigation as unintrusive as possible. This method also helped to obtain permission of using the data for research purposes and publications. The main aim of this empirical work has been to gather authentic data on the language use of bilingual speakers in Carinthia. The data includes the text genres of interviews (mostly biographical ones), children’s interactions in a nursery school, lessons from primary school and the rehearsal of a children’s theatre 10 Published transcriptions are virtually non-existent with one exception (Merkač and Jurič 1984), see also Maurer-Lausegger (1995). Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 153 group. The following discussion will focus on how language choice is managed in these contexts. The biographical interviews turned out to be monolingual either in German or Slovene. This was independent from the degree of acquaintance of interviewer and interviewee. Usually a local dialect was used, with some intrusions from the standard language. The recordings of live situations with a group of speakers which we made during a seminar on codeswitching in 2004 proved to be more challenging. The task of the students was to observe and record real life bilingual interactions in their environment. The main aim was to record cases of codeswitching in order to obtain bilingual texts. Students had to choose the situations they wanted to investigate themselves so they would feel comfortable during their research. This resulted in the following recordings:  two lessons in two bilingual primary schools  a series of recordings in bilingual nursery schools  one rehearsal of a children's lay theatre group Recordings were either made with a DAT recorder or a video camera. Students had to transcribe the whole recording according to the GAT system (Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem, see Selting et al. 1998). The interactions were quite varied and yielded some unexpected results, which call for thorough investigation. The recorded situations can be classified according to the linguistic repertoires of the participants and the domains in question as more or less favouring Slovene or bilingual (mixed) language use. As mentioned above, the domain of cultural life is one of the areas where Slovene language use is still to be found. Therefore, the rehearsal of the lay theatre group had the highest potential for Slovene. In the educational context, on the other hand, the linguistic repertoire turned out to be more developed in older children. Therefore, the nursery school was the setting with the least potential for Slovene. Let us start with language use in the nursery school. For our research, recordings were made in a public nursery school with both bilingual and monolingual groups. The bilingual groups were attended both by children with a bilingual upbringing and children with a monolingual (German) upbringing. The nursery-school teachers themselves were also either bilingual or monolingual, depending on the group they worked in. The student (who was herself a bilingual nursery-school teacher) made video recordings of the children at lunch. This means that all categories of speakers could be recorded together: bilingual and monolingual ones from both bilingual and monolingual groups. Altogether, Ursula Doleschal 154 two recordings of about half an hour each were transcribed. These recording involved six children and three teachers (two bilingual, one monolingual). The children were between 4 and 6 years old. Three of the children spoke Slovene at home with at least one of their parents, the other three spoke German at home. All six children attended a bilingual group. This nicely illustrates the current situation that parents who do not or cannot speak Slovene with their children send them to bilingual schools (see 3.1). In the two interactions filmed, only two children - two girls, who happened to be cousins - used Slovene (a local dialect) along with German. All the other children spoke only German (also dialect), regardless of the linguistic repertoire of the addressees. It seems that the children with a monolingual upbringing did not understand much of the Slovene spoken by the two girls although they were attending a bilingual group. The two bilingual children spoke Slovene only to each other and to the bilingual teachers. All the other children were addressed in German, although one of them knew Slovene and spoke Slovene with her mother, but she did not use it in the situations recorded. Although these recordings provide too little material to draw any firm conclusions, they still describe a typical scenario. This is confirmed by the observations of another student who also studied a nursery school (but did not turn in the recording and the transcript, so this material cannot be used for research) and the recordings by Gombos (1999, cf. also 2003). Not even bilingual children speak Slovene in the nursery school very often, let alone children with a monolingual German upbringing. Even when the latter are consistently addressed in Slovene by the teachers, they only answer in German. This means that they acquire a certain receptive language competence but are apparently not motivated enough to use it productively. Thus, these data confirm the results of the studies cited above that Slovene is a language of the home which is rarely used in public, especially if people who speak German are present. On the other hand, the nursery school recordings show an interesting detail of a new bilingual interpretation of language use: The two girls who spoke Slovene to each other did so without taking any notice of the linguistic repertoire of other persons present (in contrast to what used to be usual among adults, see section 3.1). This was seen as normal behaviour by the other children, who did not complain or react in any negative way. One of them simply asked another one if she understood what the two were talking about, and the latter reported what their conversation was about. This small Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 155 scene is an indicator of the change in attitude towards speaking Slovene that can be brought about by bilingual educational institutions. 11 Let us now turn to the second type of situation investigated, a lesson in a primary school. The two student researchers (both of them teachers and working at different schools) chose to record a language lesson. The language lesson in a bilingual class means that both German and Slovene are taught. Children learn to speak, read and write in both languages. The way in which the alternation between the two languages is organized is usually up to the teachers, and they do not have any special training for it during their studies. They are merely obliged to observe an equal percentage (50: 50) between the two languages. Only recently have the regional school authorities started to encourage the use of models of bilingual education (Sandrieser 2010, 2013). The two lessons observed were dedicated to Slovene. The students thought that otherwise they would not have the opportunity to record enough codeswitching because too little Slovene would be spoken. 12 Let us start off by looking at a first year class with twelve children. The recording was made after three months of schooling (December 2004). Ten of the children attended the lesson in question, 5 girls and 5 boys. Their sociolinguistic background was as follows: one of them only spoke Slovene at home with both her parents and with her brothers and sisters, i.e. the local dialect to be more precise. At school she spoke only German, unless spoken to in Slovene. Another child was spoken to in Slovene by his mother, whereas his father only spoke German to him. The child himself only used German. One child had Bosnian as his mother tongue as well as accent-free command of German (i.e., the local dialect). Bosnian was the language used in his family. At the same time, he also knew Slovene quite well because he went to pre-school and was able to make use of positive transfer from Bosnian. The remaining seven children only spoke German at home, although in all cases (but one) at least one of the parents knew Slovene but preferred not to use it. What is more, all seven of them had attended a bilingual nursery school. This again illustrates the hypothesis put forward above (section 3.1) that the acquisition of Slovene is relegated to institutions outside of the family, like nursery and primary school. Thus, Slovene is turning into a foreign language for its supposedly native speakers. This is also illustrated by the children's behaviour: although the teacher used mostly Slovene, the children tried to speak German to her and also to one another, treating Slovene as the object and not the instrument of their schooling. Even the one child who only spoke Slovene at home usually used 11 That this is indeed the case was confirmed by a larger project with a bilingual primary school with a time-based dual language model, see Doleschal (2011: 168-170, in press) and Purkarthofer (2016). 12 Cf. also the results of Ogris (2014: 141-150) corroborating this evaluation. Ursula Doleschal 156 German when addressing the teacher. On the other hand, children were eager to learn the language, and they engaged willingly in the learning process. The picture obtained in the second school is a little more difficult to interpret. Here we have a second year class where the children are about 8 years old. Four children were recorded during a language lesson. Two of them (girls) spoke Slovene at home with their mothers while the other two (twin boys) spoke some Slovene with their father, or at least he helped them with their homework. During the lesson only the girls spoke Slovene freely (mostly dialect, unless they were repeating what the teacher said). They used both Slovene and German, whereas the boys were very silent and quite reluctant even to engage in the lesson. But it was clear that they understood Slovene since the two girls only spoke Slovene to them at the end of the lesson, and they reacted to that. Finally, the theatre rehearsal reveals different results again. This situation falls under the heading of “cultural association” or “cultural event” and is therefore predestined for the use of Slovene. Two adults and eight children participated in the recording (which lasted approximately one hour). Both adults were speakers of Slovene and actively used the language at home and with their friends as well as at work, along with German. The children came from a rather intact (in the sense of language use) Carinthian Slovene community and background. They were between 6 and 14 years old. All of them spoke Slovene at home with at least one of their parents. They were part of a Slovene lay theatre group rehearsing The Wizard of Oz. Parents attended the rehearsal, too. Quite unexpectedly for the students who did the recording, all the children, as well as the adults, only spoke Slovene (the local dialect), even to one another during the rehearsal. The recording is therefore monolingually Slovene. On the other hand, the students observed that the children switched to German when they left the hall and continued to speak to one another only in German. If we come back to the question of a “mixed language”, the four situations in question reveal the following: Carinthian Slovenes do not seem to codeswitch habitually (this tentative result is corroborated by observations made by students independently of their task but has to be treated as a hypothesis to be tested in more informal situations, cf. also Maurer-Lausegger 1993: 97). Therefore, speaking “mixed” may rather refer to the use of either one or the other language with the same persons depending on the situation (as in the last example of the theatre rehearsal.). If codeswitching occurs in our recordings, it is almost always intersentential codeswitching, i.e. the language is switched when a new sentence is started, Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 157 not within a clause. Only the two youngest informants, the 4-year-old girls, mix languages within sentences, but only four times in 184 utterances, e.g. 13 (1) tina ambart untern tisch pogwoj Tina once under the table look Tina, have a look under the table Ad hoc loans are also rather rare in our material: (2) teacher: ˈaj pa pupil: jaz si tud želim schwimmbecken an tak velek teacher: schwimmbecken (.) zdaj? teacher: what then pupil: I myself also wish swimming pool a so big teacher: swimming pool - now? teacher: What? pupil: I would like to have a swimming pool, such a big one teacher: a swimming pool? Now? The teachers switched more often than the children, usually to repeat something they said in the other language, too, but this behaviour has to do with their role as teachers of a bilingual class. Although such an approach is not considered useful from the point of view of bilingual language teaching, it seems to occur naturally, especially because the teachers are under the impression that the German-speaking children do not understand enough Slovene. This, however, can be a misconception as our example of the two boys shows. Children just refuse to speak Slovene although they probably understand a lot when they are at school. Data from a larger project carried out in a primary school with day-by-day language alternation in 2010 shows a similar picture. There, teachers use Slovene consequently on Slovene days, and they do not have problems in making themselves understood by the children (for a description of the project see Doleschal 2011, in press; Purkarthofer 2016). As has been stated above, Slovene seems to be in the process of becoming a second - or even a foreign - language for children from a Carinthian Slovene background, and there is a tendency that this manner of acquisition will prevail in the future (cf. the interviews in Doleschal 2009b). What does this mean for speakers of Slovene? What are their attitudes and what about their identity? Do they feel Slovene in any way? 13 German is marked by italics. Ursula Doleschal 158 In order to find out about the influence and impact of this type of acquisition on language attitude and identity, we carried out narrative interviews, mostly language biographies, with marginal speakers of Slovene, i.e. speakers who do not belong to the minority in that they either do not come from an originally Slovene family, or learned Slovene in school or as adults as a result of marrying a Carinthian Slovene person. Brigitta Busch, who conducted most of the interviews, has detected evidence that knowing more than one register or lect is crucial for a feeling of belonging to a language community (cf. Busch 2008; Busch and Doleschal 2008) while foreign language teaching focuses just on the standard language. Nevertheless, command of a second variety of Slovene can be achieved by pupils attending special multilingual classes at the Klagenfurt Grammar School for Slovenes 14 , in the so-called “Kugy” classes. Here children from Austria, Slovenia and Italy are in the same class and are taught in all three languages plus English. But most importantly, the pupils also live together in a boarding house and have the opportunity to get to know and actively use the colloquial or dialectal varieties as well. Adults, too, can master different lects if they are motivated enough to learn them in real life situations, especially within the family of their spouses (cf. Busch 2008). Interviews also show that identification with the Slovene community is not a direct function of the level of competence in the language, but people who identify with Slovene view their own command of the language critically and furthermore express the wish to accomplish their knowledge. 3. Concluding remarks The situation of the Slovene minority in Austria is changing in that Slovene is nowadays perceived differently by Austrian Carinthians. This also brings about changes in identity for the associated ethnic group. Language is indeed a powerful factor of identity and for many nationalities and ethnic groups, it is the crucial factor. As we have seen, this is also true for the Slovene minority in Carinthia. However, Slovene has already been abandoned as the language of the home by many people of Slovene origin: although they still know the language (having learnt it from their parents), they refuse to pass it on to their children in a natural way. But instead of giving it up altogether, as used to be the case for most of the 20th century, Slovene can nowadays, 25 years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, be treated differently by these people. It has become the state language of the neighbouring country and has thus also become prominent as a standard language. Obviously - but this interpretation will have to be corroborated by more research - the local 14 BG/ BRG für Slowenen; ZG/ ZRG za Slovence, https: / / www.slog.at/ home_sl. Multilingualism in Carinthia: The case of Slovene and the Slovene minority 159 Slovene dialects are not valued by these people and do not give them a feeling of intimacy, the emotional function of language probably being fulfilled by the German equivalent. Therefore, it seems, they wish for their children to learn standard Slovene in an institutional setting and send them to bilingual schools. This does, of course, have consequences for the Slovene minority. 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The bridges he has built have connected people and their research perspectives, and it is in this spirit that I wish to continue his work in the area of culture-and-language learning. When looking at current debates in this field such an approach seems highly relevant, indeed. While there is general agreement that culture learning must address the challenges posed by a globalized modernity, the different approaches still exist either in opposition with or little knowledge of each other. Considering the complexity of these challenges, it would make more sense, however, to join forces and pool resources to develop a timely concept for culture-and-language learning. In this article a case is made for a concept of language education where language and culture should not be separated. As a starting point a text by the British writer and actress Meera Syal is discussed, in which the author suggests the term assisted marriage as an alternative to the negatively loaded arranged marriage. Her article shows how creative language use can help overcome binary thinking and cultural stereotyping. Yet, her article is also couched in language which may invite uncritical consent to the ideas expressed. In more abstract terms, I would argue that textual appreciation here needs to be complemented by critical discourse analysis. In other words, a model is introduced where communicative competence is viewed as a discourse competence aiming for dialogue-friendly language use and power-critical language awareness. Furthermore, my approach to Syal’s text will be linked to current cultural-learning debates. Recently, one approach in particular has claimed a leading role. The approach in question goes under the banner of transculturality, and some of its proponents argue that in opposition to inter- und multicultural theories - theirs is the only perspective in tune with Werner Delanoy 164 the dynamics of culture formation in a globalized modernity. On closer inspection, however, the borders and boundaries between, for example, transand intercultural approaches are not as clear-cut as suggested. Indeed, both transculturality and interculturality are inclusive of concepts which view cultures as dynamic, open, hybrid and interrelated entities. Moreover, these two concepts are not the only ones sharing such a perspective on culture, cosmopolitanism being a case in point. Also, they all aim for a more democratic, inclusive, diverse and peaceful world on local and global levels. Rather than pitting these approaches against each other, I would, therefore, argue for building bridges between them to pool their efforts in the interest of the abovementioned aims. Finally, proponents of all these approaches agree that communicative competence is particularly important in a globalized modernity. Considering the role of English as a global language, such a perspective is highly pertinent to English language learning, indeed. 2. “Assisted Marriage”: A model case for culture-and-language learning? The term assisted marriage is taken from the article “Arranged Marriage”, written by Meera Syal. Let me point out that the article I refer to is not the piece first published under Syal’s name but a shortened version published by Mel Calman and Ben Duncan in their book Short Cuts: Using Texts to Explore English (1995: 97-98). Moreover, the text version which I used in my own classes is again a (slightly) shortened version of the Calman & Duncan text, and when I edited the text, passages were omitted, where humour is at the expense of other people (e.g. “a yak breeder with a hare’s lip”). 1 What Calman & Duncan removed from their version I do not know since I have not been able to trace the source text. Thus, I am aware that rather than referring to Syal’s text it would be more appropriate to speak of Syal’s text as filtered by Calman & Duncan and ‘censored’ by Delanoy. Yet, for simplicity’s sake I will just name her as the author of the piece. 2.1 How the text can serve a democratic and dialogic agenda Seyla Benhabib (2002: 83) points out that arranged marriages are among the most frequently listed practices that lead to “clashes of intercultural evaluation”. In other words, arranged marriage certainly qualifies as a highly 1 Syal playfully and humorously deals with stereotypes in her text. In interculturallearning pedagogy, the question, however, is who makes fun of whom. While in the case of self-deprecating humour playfulness and humour may be perfectly acceptable, it can be hurtful when it is directed against others (cf. Bredella 1999: 110). This is the reason why I cut such comment. Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 165 problematic issue in cultural learning contexts. When discussing this term with my (university) students of English, there was general agreement that the concept implies force, motives other than love, severe repression when resisted, and violence in particular against women. Moreover, it was placed in opposition to western practices where free choice and romance would be the basis for finding a marriage partner. Syal (1995: 97) offers a different perspective. On the one hand, she does not deny that “some arranged marriages do end in unhappiness and sometimes in violence”; on the other hand, she criticizes the negative media coverage of the concept. Syal (ibid.) puts forward her arguments in cheeky and irreverent language, for example, when she lists media clichés (e.g. “the bridegroom being a distant cousin who’s a yak breeder with a hare lip, needing a British passport”). Also, she claims that “only those … who live in those communities know the larger picture” (ibid.). She then introduces a concrete character - her cousin Shaila - who up to her late twenties leads a carefree and hedonistic life, and then decides to opt for an arranged marriage by asking her family to help her find a suitable marriage partner. When presenting her case, Syal (ibid.) creates a new term - assisted marriage - to give outsiders better insight into her community’s marriage practices, which always rest on open discussion with the family and the right of the individual to say no when the chosen partner does not meet his/ her expectations. In the light of cultural-learning debates, the term assisted marriage is rich in potential for cultural learning. First, it can help question a negative stereotype and invite a less lop-sided look at what is perceived as a nonwestern marriage practice. Secondly, in line with Afef Benessaieh’s (2010: 16-17) transcultural approach, the concept “traverses cultures bringing to light what is common or alike amid what seems to be different”. In other words, forms of assistance and regimentation can be found across cultures. Marriage in western cultures is also assisted by help agents (e.g. by dating agencies, matchmaking friends, etc.), and it is also subject to forms of sociocultural regimentation (e.g. racial, class-related and monetary barriers). Thus, with the help of Syal’s article a binary (free individual choice v. outside determination), which unfavourably contrasts western and oriental practices, can be deconstructed. Thirdly, the article showcases a life approach where the protagonist (Shaila) feels equally at home in different traditions and can move between them at her own free will without losing the support of her community. Such agency is in line with what Benhabib (2002: 19) suggests as normative conditions for a “universalist deliberative democracy”. What Benhabib has in mind is a democratic agenda respected across countries and cultures. Moreover, she makes a case for a deliberative democracy, where decisions are made through discussion and not by force. Werner Delanoy 166 She then lists three normative conditions for such a programme, which she names as “egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association” (Benhabib 2002: 1). While the first condition implies equal rights for everybody, the other two stand for the freedom of the individual to join and leave groups and communities. Freedom of association also implies that despite membership in one group alliances can be forged with others without fear of reprisal. These normative conditions all apply in Shaila’s case. Contrary to stereotypical expectations, Asian-British women here also have the right to experiment with and move between life approaches (equal rights principle and voluntary selfascription), and to say no when they are in disagreement with their elders’ wishes (freedom of exit). Building on Benhabib’s model, Gerard Delanty (2009: 261) suggests a cosmopolitan concept of intercultural communication. For Delanty, such communication implies five characteristics; namely, it is (a) deliberative, (b) reflective and (c) critical in its orientation, plus (d) “it entails societal learning” and (e) “it concerns political practice that has a global relevance”. Applied to Syal’s text, I would argue that, to some extent, these five conditions are all met. As already mentioned, the text can invite critical reflection upon a problematic issue. Moreover, deconstructing binaries between West and East is a cultural issue of global significance, and gaining a more differentiated understanding of oriental practices also has political implications since it may help foster recognition of marginalized communities. Finally, as a neologism, the term assisted marriage is a good example of how creative language use can open up new space for critical (self)-reflection and a more differentiated understanding of other people and their practices. From a ‘western’ perspective, people can become aware of the limits of their individuality, and they may cease to treat ‘oriental’ practices as a monolith. In an earlier article (Delanoy 2007a: 105), I argued that language creativity is an important dimension of dialogic language use to find new terminology and communication strategies in the interest of peaceful conflict resolution. This notion of dialogue includes engagement with different cultural practices and transformation in the light of other viewpoints. Moreover, respect for other people and their life approaches is a key condition. As for respectful language use, however, I feel ambivalent about Syal’s piece owing to the irreverant tone of some of her comments. On the one hand, her flippant remarks can help create a relaxed atmosphere when discussing a serious topic; on the other hand, they may also hurt people’s feelings. Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 167 2.2 The text’s problematic discourse strategies When looking at Syal’s discourse strategies, her use of the pronoun we deserves closer attention. In the opening sentence (“It’s a sticky one, this whole area of how we are represented”), it is not further specified who is included in the we she invokes (Syal 1995: 97). It definitely includes herself, probably the community she speaks for, and it may also extend to outsiders receptive to her arguments, who I see as the intended audience of her piece. In the following comments she repeatedly makes use of an us that knows, which refers to the community she lives in. This community is opposed to a them which has a distorted image of her community. Indeed, she claims that “only those of us who live in those communities know the larger picture”, while other people cannot gain such insight because of the power of media clichés. Moreover, she states that the negative image of arranged marriages only holds true for “some” situations, while an extreme case (before she opts for an assisted marriage Shaila “downed lagers” and told her aunties “that every thinking person should swing both ways”) is presented as a model example of “how it now happens round my [the author’s; my insertion] way” (ibid.). Finally, Shaila’s life approach does not create any friction in her community on whose wholehearted support she can rely without fail. To my mind, such discourse is persuasive in orientation because of its use of binaries (us v. them) and its claim that only insiders are in the know; which implies that outsiders have to accept as true what they are told. Also, no hedges (e.g. modal markers) are used to lessen the force of the arguments put forward, thus suggesting that this is the rather than one truth. Furthermore, one extreme type of practice (forced marriages) is rendered as relatively insignificant, while another (Shaila’s case) is elevated to the status of a common practice. Indeed, in the light of counter examples, e.g. the evidence provided by Asian women’s self-help groups in the UK (cf. Sanghera 2007: 275-285), I would doubt that forced marriages are first and foremost a media-cliché and not a disturbing reality. Also, the total acceptance of Shaila’s behaviour by her community seems highly unrealistic. In critical discourse analysis (cf. Fairclough 1998; Zima 1989) Syal’s text would qualify as ideologically motivated, i.e. as a form of language use where the recipients are invited to uncritically consent to something which is presented as an unquestionable truth. For the sociologist Manfred Prischnig (2009: 115 f.), such language use is a widespread phenomenon in a globalized modernity to hail a neoliberal programme as a concept without alternatives. For Prischnig (2009: 75), some of the hallmarks of a neoliberal life-approach are its focus on the seemingly free individual, a hedonistic lifestyle and the possibility of combining extremes which used to rule each other out. Prischnig, however, adds that in reality such a life-approach is only possible and accepted within systemic limits, and I would add that such a life can only be lived by some people (e.g. depending on their income Werner Delanoy 168 and cultural upbringing), although its persuasive power may fire people’s imagination across different income groups and cultures. This ideologycritical perspective can also be found in approaches with a cosmopolitan and transcultural orientation. Miriam Sobré-Denton & Nilhanjana Bardhan (2014: 2-6) make a case for a power-critical cosmopolitanism informed by a postcolonial agenda and directed against the economic and cultural imperialism of a neoliberal logic. Similarly, Marwan Kraidy (2005: 161) argues in favour of a “critical transculturalism” to highlight “the seductive discourse” of a neoliberal programme. This raises the question if and how Syal’s text compares to such a logic. With reference to Prischnig, there is some overlap, indeed. Shaila is presented as an individual with total freedom to choose her life approach. Moreover, she can indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle, and she can switch between extremes, that is to say, between a promiscuous life and an arranged marriage. In addition, the absence of any conflict creates the illusion of a fluid modernity, where borders are no longer conflict zones and where people can happily move between different cultural practices as freely as capital streams. Finally, none of Shaila’s agency calls into question neoliberal aims. For example, in her practices she is neither an antimaterialist nor an anti-globalization activist. Summing up, I view the text as ambivalent in its potential for cultureand-language learning. On the one hand, the text can serve democratic and dialogic ends. It can help overcome a negative stereotype, invite a lessbiased perspective on minority communities plus critical reflection upon ‘western’ marriage practices. Moreover, Shaila’s agency is in line with the hallmarks of a universalistic democracy as suggested by cosmopolitan scholars. Finally, the text can set an example for creative language use in the interest of a dialogic agenda. On the other hand, the discourse strategies used can impede critical thinking and may serve neoliberal ends. This ambivalent evaluation shows that I would not view the text itself as a model case for culture-and-language learning. I would argue, however, that the twin-approach chosen may serve as such. This approach is both appreciative of a text’s dialogic potential and critical of manipulative language use. Finally, it brings together cultural-learning perspectives, which - as will be shown in section 3.2. - may make rather strange bedfellows in the light of current debates. 3. Language-and-culture learning in a globalized modernity In this part, I will first focus on what I mean by a globalized modernity and why communication plays a crucial role in this context (3.1). In 3.2 a case is made for integrating intercultural, transcultural and cosmopolitan Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 169 perspectives to pool their resources in the interest of a timely concept of culture-and-language learning. 3.1 Language education in a globalized modernity What I mean by a globalized modernity is a world shaped by global communication networks, transnational business connections, migration on an unprecedented scale, rapid technological change creating new possibilities and risks, plus increased socio-cultural interpenetration on both local and global levels. Since the fall of the iron curtain, the main engine behind globalization processes has been a neoliberal economy aiming for maximum profit for big economic players through trade liberalization, deregulation (as long as it is in these players’ interest) and privatization. Yet, neoliberalism is not the only force shaping life-worlds on local and global levels. Alternative approaches abound, including religious fundamentalisms (which are on the rise), social-democratic movements, or green and antiglobalization initiatives. Moreover, this modernity is not a place of equal life opportunities; it is shaped by social inequalities and growing gaps between the rich and the poor. How are people’s lives affected by such a dynamic? Zygmunt Bauman (2000) uses the term liquid modernity to discuss some of the effects. For him (2000: 4f.), a liquid modernity is characterized by permanent and rapid change, plus the need to continuously create new knowledge to cope with new demands. Bauman (ibid. 7) adds that in a liquid modernity responsibility for success and failure increasingly lies with the single person who is constantly faced with the need to make decisions. Because of global interconnectedness, the personal is also implicated in wide-reaching dimensions. In other words, personal responsibility implies accountability for issues of potentially global relevance. Moreover, since people as social beings need to articulate and negotiate their interests in their decisionmaking processes, these responsibilities are connected to ‘response-abilities’, i.e. to communicative competencies. For language education in general and ELT in particular such a perspective has wide-reaching implications. The link between responsibility and ‘response-ability’ makes communicative competence a major objective for all education. Moreover, the demand for more personal responsibility implies that communicative competence becomes a core ability for the single person. Also, because of an increase in global interconnectedness those languages become particularly important which permit decision-making on transnational levels. Here, English is of particular relevance. Finally, the need to communicate in a dynamic and globally connected world entails forms of language education where the learners are given insight into the complexity of contemporary living conditions, and where language and Werner Delanoy 170 thought are used creatively to meet situation-specific and changing demands. 2 The prominent role of communication is repeatedly emphasized in culture-related debates. From a cosmopolitan perspective, Sobré-Denton & Bardhan (2014: 31) stress that “Cosmopolitanism is inherently communicative”. In a similar vein, Delanty (2009: 219) points out that in a “postmodern world” communication has become more important because of “the loss of markers of certainty”. He argues (ibid.) that “intercultural communication is now more important than ever”, and he adds that in contradistinction to more traditional concepts, culture learning now should be linked to taking political action. Moreover, in inter-, transcultural and cosmopolitan studies, links have been forged between power-critical awareness and communicative competence. Piller (2011: 53) states that “it is not the role of intercultural communication scholarship to be complicit in hegemonic cultural politics, but to help us understand how these work”. Kraidy (2005: 161) argues in favour of a transcultural perspective which gives insight into “the seductive discourse and reductive structures of globalization”. Sobré-Denton & Bardhan (2014: 2) have a cosmopolitanism in mind that is critical of “colonial violence, European (and later U.S.) hegemony and cultural imperialism”. For all these scholars communicative competence is inclusive of ideologycritical abilities. There is a danger, however, that such criticism is only applied to neoliberal and western programmes, while it is equally important for other manipulative practices (e.g. the propaganda videos of the Islamic State). Also, let me add here that power-critical approaches themselves must be open to critical scrutiny. Following a hermeneutics after Gadamer, all forms of understanding are limited, and should, therefore, be subjected to critical inspection in the light of other perspectives. All the scholars mentioned agree on a notion of culture which stresses the dynamism, diversity, interconnectedness and permeability of cultures in a globalized modernity. Moreover, they all aim for a democratic world where conflicts are solved through dialogic communication. Being affiliated to intercultural, transcultural and cosmopolitan schools, one may get the impression that these concepts could easily join forces in pursuit of their aims. However, some obstacles still need removing before such cooperation can become a reality. 2 Such a perspective goes far beyond the concept of communicative competence as suggested by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), where flexible and critical thinking, creative language use and content-related dimensions only play a subordinate role (cf. Delanoy 2007b). Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 171 3.2 Quo vadis cultural-learning theory? In the theories discussed in this article, a globalized modernity is often compared to an earlier modernity with the nation state at the centre, where the concept of nation implied internal homogeneity and clear external borders. By contrast, the nation state is now viewed as a diverse and complex cultural entity with diminished socio-cultural and economic power, with permeable external borders, and implicated in issues of global significance. This re-evaluation of the nation-state in the light of global interconnectedness is a central characteristic of transcultural approaches. Transculturalists (e.g. Bennnesaieh 2010; Schulze-Engler 2002; Welsch 1999 & 2009) have repeatedly referred to this re-evaluation as a sea change in culture studies by opposing their concept to those of interand multiculturality, which in their view still hark back to a monolithic notion of cultures. There is no denying that a globalized modernity requires new concepts of culture and cultural learning, and that interand multicultural approaches have treated cultures as islands and monoliths. Yet, neither internor multiculturality is a homogeneous discourse, and this criticism does not hold true for all interand multicultural perspectives. My background is in the tradition of intercultural learning, building on a post-Gadamerian hermeneutics. 3 As for its structural properties, such an approach does not treat cultures in static, monolithic and bounded ways. Instead, it is based on the conviction that human understanding is always limited, and that it can be enlarged through respectful and (self)-critical confrontation with other viewpoints (cf. Delanoy 2007a). In other words, people are not invited to cling to their beliefs but to enrich and transform them through intercultural contact. Moreover, a hybridization of viewpoints is welcome to increase one’s scope of reflection and action (cf. Bredella 2010: 135-139). Also, a case is made for a notion of dialogue which is democratic in orientation, thus aiming for equal partnership and for including as many people as possible in decision-making processes irrespective of their cultural affiliations (cf. Delanoy 2007b). In addition, categories such as self and other or the own and foreign are treated as relational and not as ontological entities (cf. Bredella 2010: 142), that is to say, nothing is foreign or the same per se, but only in relation to a specific point of reference. Indeed, this principle can also be applied to the relationship between transcultural and intercultural approaches. In other words, both can vary in their aims and structural properties, and, depending on who/ what is compared with whom/ what, their relationship can be one of opposition, complement or overlap. 3 What I mean by a post-Gadamerian hermeneutics is a perspective which aims to integrate Gadamer’s notion of dialogue and power-critical approaches. A good example is Hans-Herbert Kögler’s (1992) critical hermeneutics. Werner Delanoy 172 This can also be said of the relationship between trans- und multicultural approaches. Delanty (2009: 156) distinguishes different multicultural approaches. He argues that while traditional liberal concepts often treated cultures as monoliths, a cosmopolitan multiculturalism regards them as dynamic and mutually interconnected entities. Speaking of cosmopolitan approaches, I have not come across the term transculturality in these debates. Indeed, the term used is intercultural (e.g. Delanty 2009: 261; Sobré-Denton & Bardhan 2014: 12), yet, the concept endorsed emphasizes increased societal interpenetration and global interconnectedness. Even in fields like intercultural communication, where behaviourist approaches have repeatedly treated cultures as static and clearly delineable entities, perspectives can be found which are strictly opposed to a “banal nationalism”. Piller’s (2011: 65) approach is a case in point. In other words, transculturalists are not the only ones who have moved with the times, and the term transcultural as such is not a pre-condition for engaging with contemporary socio-cultural challenges. Indeed, the discourse strategies used by some transculturalists to put their concept on a pedestal need to be critiqued. For Welsch (1999 & 2009) trans-, interand multiculturality can be clearly distinguished as if they were homogenous entities. Thus, the diversity within inter-, multiand transcultural debates is swept under the carpet. Moreover, the transcultural is posited as the superior concept. There is a contradiction, however, between the thinking that Welsch sees as crucial for understanding current socio-cultural development, and the one he practices when dealing with rival positions. While Welsch makes a case for internal diversity, permeable borders and interconnectedness in his concept of culture, his treatment of other theories is a travesty of his programme, since other positions are treated as monoliths with clear-cut borders. Such thinking runs counter to a dialogic agenda where contact is sought with different perspectives to critically question and expand one’s own. Moreover, the political and pedagogical implications of some transcultural approaches seem highly problematic. 4 For Welsch (2009), globalization is a benign force, which according to his teleological programme is in the process of replacing the age of cultural separation (spanning the past 40,000 years) with the new age of hybridisation. For him, this new age will make our planet a more peaceful world, and to his mind new development justifies the loss of some cultures (Welsch 2009: 14-15). However, he does not further question why and which life-forms will disappear, and who will benefit from such loss. Moreover, his long-term perspective does not include the concrete present. In my view, such an 4 For a more detailed discussion of what I view as problematic about some transcultural approaches (in particular Welsch’s), see Delanoy (2014). Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 173 approach can aid and abet the main engine behind current globalization processes, namely a neoliberal economy, and even the damage done by it becomes justifiable as an evolutionary necessity. Another case is Afef Benessaieh’s (2010: 28) understanding of transculturality, which according to him is “a chameleonic disposition for strategically rearranging one’s sense of cultural identity by drawing from an expanded repertoire - according to the moment context or location”. The notion of the modern person as a chameleon and opportunist, however, seems ill-suited to help people develop a “universalistic morality” (cf. Benhabib 2002: 171) and to engage in “political practice that has a global relevance” (cf. Delanty 2009: 261). Speaking of a ‘universalistic morality’, let me point out that my understanding of a universalistic position is influenced by Bredella’s intercultural-learning approach and a rooted cosmopolitanism as suggested by Sobré-Denton & Bardhan. Bredella (2000: 153-155; 2010: 113-122) emphasizes the importance of universalistic concepts to foster a humanrights agenda of global proportions by arguing in favour of a self-critical and dialogic universalism. In a similar vein, Sobré-Denton & Bardhan (2014: 21) point out that “claims of universality always arise out of particular locations”. They argue in favour of a “dialogue between multiple universalisms arising from various cultural viewpoints and locations from around the world”, thus rejecting earlier Eurocentric concepts (ibid.). In other words, Sobré-Denton & Bardhan (2014: 152) see their approach as a “rooted cosmopolitanism”, where the contextual embeddedness of particular positions is acknowledged and where decisions are made in an open intercultural dialogue. A further complement to this approach is Dirk Moses’ and Michael Rothberg’s transcultural ethics which sketches one path towards a universalistic morality. For Rothberg, communities should acknowledge each other’s histories of suffering and how they are implicated in each other. That way they can develop sympathy for each other, and they can begin to imagine “a more equitable future” in transcultural, i.e. universalistic terms (cf. Moses & Rothberg 2015: 29, 33). Coming back to my criticism of transcultural perspectives, let me add that it would be unfair to refer to their problematic aspects only. Welsch’s notion of culture certainly has sharpened my understanding of hybridisation processes. Also, transculturality is a broad church offering different perspectives. For example, compared to Welsch, Benessaieh (2010: 11) draws a more differentiated picture of globalization processes. For him, “more cultural proximity” is not just a positive but an ambivalent force leading to cooperation and adversity. Moreover, although he follows Welsch in his distinction between transand interculturality, Benessaieh (2010: 18-19) also goes beyond Welsch by clarifying which concrete intercultural practices he has in mind (i.e. how the term was used to emphasize Quebec’s independence; the UNESCO definition of interculturality as of 1980). This Werner Delanoy 174 paves the way for a more relational understanding of the two concepts. Another case is Kraidy’s critical transculturalism which is opposed to a “corporate transculturalism” or “cosmopolitan capitalism” where cultural hybridisation offers “wedges for forging affective links between … commodities and local communities” (cf. Kraidy 2005: 90, 147). Although I disagree with Kraidy’s general comments on interculturality (ibid. 14), I highly value his distinction between different transculturalisms and his power-critical position. Moreover, he shows that cultural hybridisation can serve different ends, including those of a neoliberal programme. 4. Conclusion Summing up, rather than treating approaches in isolation or pitting them against each other, a case has been made for a joint dialogue to develop a timely concept of language-and-culture learning. In this article, I have suggested an alliance of intercultural, transcultural and cosmopolitan concepts to help achieve this aim. While transand intercultural learning have been treated as opposites, cosmopolitanism so far has only played a marginal role in interand transcultural debates, one exception being Bredella’s intercultural-learning pedagogy (2010: 113-122). However, there is significant overlap between a post-Gadamerian intercultural-learning approach and a rooted cosmopolitanism, for example, in terms of their shared concept of dialogue. Moreover, interculturality and cosmopolitanism are more in synch with transcultural approaches than some transculturalists may believe. In other words, rather than having schools exist independently, a perspective is suggested where they can complement and question each other. Let me add here that this is only a first step. I chose these three schools because of a continuing dead-end debate between transand interculturalists, which in the light of their current state of development seems much ado about little. Moreover, I have included a third approach - cosmopolitanism - because of its overlap with the other two and its rich potential for imagining a global democracy. Also, the power-critical work of rooted cosmopolitans and critical transculturalists can give more weight to the ideology-critical and political dimension in intercultural-learning debates, where, in my view, it has only played a subordinate role so far. 5 Of course, this alliance can and should be enlarged by co-opting further schools. For my own theory building, I will include postcolonial approaches more strongly in my next step. Such a move should fall on fertile ground, 5 It is worthy of note that in intercultural studies Michael Byram argued in favour of linking cultural learning to taking political action as early as in 1988 (cf. Byram 1988: 18). This political interest, however, somehow fizzled out in the subsequent years. Building bridges - towards a timely concept for culture-and-language learning 175 since postcolonial approaches have already found their way into trans- (e.g. Kraidy 2005), intercultural (e.g. Hofmann 2006) and cosmopolitan positions (e.g. Sobré-Denton & Bardhan 2014). Let me emphasize that this joint approach is informed by a specific notion of culture-and-language learning. First, cultures are treated as diverse, dynamic, overlapping, (globally) interconnected and permeable entities. Secondly, the main objective is to foster democratic and dialogic relationships through communication. Thirdly, a concept of language education is suggested where language learning cannot be divorced from continuous engagement with issues of global significance. Fourthly, English is seen as key player, that is to say, as a language for global dialogue. 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Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalität? , 1-16, http: / / www2.uni-jena.de/ Welsch/ tk-1.pdf/ accessed: 20.02.2012. Zima, Peter V. 1989. Ideologie und Theorie. Eine Diskurskritik. Tübingen: Francke. Bernhard Kettemann Orientalism/ Occidentalism Abstract In this paper, I look first at stereotyping as a representational, social, and signifying practice, which exploits difference in order to define ourselves. Then I move on to analysing a specific type of stereotyping when it becomes the policy of a state, namely racism. From there it is only a small step to Orientalism and ultimately to Occidentalism, the other side of the coin of Orientalism. And it is with this coin that we are paying now, which means that we as Europeans are now being exposed to stereotyping by others. 1. Stereotyping: A Historical Perspective This paper deals with our construction of the other. We are surrounded by constructions of difference in order to reassure us of our own identity. In this way, we constantly construct ourselves as well as the other. There are several techniques at our disposal, which will be analysed on the following pages. First of all, there is stereotyping. Stereotypes mostly deal with representations of the other even though there are also auto-stereotypes, representations or projections of ourselves to the outside world. We will be concerned here more with hetero-stereotypes, the representation of the other and discuss some of the consequences of that kind of stereotyping. According to Lippman (1922) a stereotype is a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person or a situation etc. It is also an attitude based on such a preconception. There is a tendency for a given belief to be widespread in a society, for a belief to be oversimplified in content and unresponsive to the objective facts. It can also be a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type. (cited from Bottom, William and Kong, Dejun, and Zhang, Zhan 2007: 6). “Unresponsive to the objective facts”, that is an important point in this quote. You cannot repair stereotypes. You cannot disprove stereotypes. For example, there is a stereotype that all Americans wear sneakers and are fat and eat too much, which is not true. But then you have people visiting the States for two weeks, and they come back and say ‘Yes, I have seen them, Bernhard Kettemann 178 they are all fat and they all wear sneakers.’ Even though this person must have seen lots of other people who were not fat, they were filtered away because a stereotype is stronger than reality. A stereotype is unresponsive to objective facts. You cannot argue with a person who is convinced of his or her stereotypes. You cannot tell that person: ’This is a stereotype, give it up! ’ The person will say no even though you can prove him/ her wrong by showing another example where the stereotype does not fit. So, basically, stereotyping is a simplifying signifying practice; simplifying in the sense that only certain qualities of a person or thing are picked out and signified in the sense that we create meaning for that person or thing through our stereotypes. So far, we have been discussing the reductionist and naturalizing effects of stereotyping, calling all of these simplifying. Actually, what this simplifying means is that it essentializes certain aspects. For example, if we believe a certain group or person is stupid, the stereotype of the stupidity is ascribed to this group or person. Then this one characteristic can become essentialized and the group or person is regarded as stupid and nothing else. That is the point of essentializing. We assume that you have hundreds of characteristics as a group or as a person, and we pick out one. This is also the reductionist aspect of stereotyping. This type of stereotypical beliefs can then lead to people saying, ‘Oh, it’s natural, clearly, because he or she is soand-so, he or she must be stupid.’ Stereotyping reduces people to a few simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as “fixed in Nature” (Hall 1997: 249) and found true, irrespective of reality. Stereotypes create differences. This calls forth the question of why differences are important in our society. Let us start with a linguistic point. How do we mean? How come a word like ‘book’ is different from a word like ‘hook’? This is a minimal pair. Minimal because it only differs in one phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit. We distinguish meaning through phonemes. This is how we create meanings, this is how language works. This means, you start already with a difference in our basic tool for interaction with each other. We create different meanings through the use of meaning-distinguishing phonemes. Difference helps to create meaning. Difference is also important in communities because it creates social cohesion and social exclusion. Exclusion of the other and inclusion of us, whoever we are. Difference is important in the creation of cultural order and people’s places in it. We also have to differentiate between different orders of discourse, between different meanings in that discourse, which creates consent about something. Difference is also important on the psycho-analytical level of identity creation, the creation of the self. People differentiate themselves from other Orientalism/ Occidentalism 179 people through the creation of the self. There are techniques of creating the self that, according to Foucault, [...]permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (Foucault 1988: 18) There is probably a specific point in our development, relatively early, when the baby recognizes himself or herself as a single person, by developing a sense of personal continuity over changing situations, thus establishing a stable and unique self concept. This is when we start creating our self, working on our self in our socio-cultural context. There are many other factors that influence the construction of the self, but this is one first important step. We create differences in order to dominate others and, in order to do that, we use stereotyping. So stereotyping as a signifying practice and as a practice that creates meaning is a possibility for us to dominate others. It is a power play. We stereotype other people in order to have power over them. Where do the stereotypes that we have about other people come from? Actually, many of them can be very old. Some major stereotypes are approximately 2000 years old, if not older. We find some of these stereotypes in a book by the Roman author Cornelius Tacitus, “Germania”, written in about 100 AD and rediscovered in the age of the Renaissance at the start of scientific discoveries and the rediscovery of the ancient Roman and Greek writers and philosophers. At that time, these stereotypes that Tacitus collected about other people became standard knowledge. And they have remained as such to a certain degree. Bernhard Kettemann 180 Figure 1: “Völkertafel”, oil on canvas, at the Kammerhofmuseum in Bad Aussee (ca. 1730-1740) 1 . The painting above shows a combination of the old stereotypes with some new ones. For example, the old stereotype for the Germans is that they will end their lives in wine. This means, the drinking of the Germans is an old stereotype. The Italians, it says, will die in cloister. This means they are very pious, religious. At that time, half of Italy belonged to the Vatican, so they had to be. The French, very elegant by the way, the French will die in war. At the time when the painting was made, King Louis XIV of France (1638- 1715) was still in living memory. He invaded several former German principalities, Alsatia, Lorraine and the Palatinate, as well as Southern Germany, which belonged to Austria. So war is not a prejudice, it was a fact of the time. The Spanish come out best and are proud. They had colonies and ruled the waves/ seas till 1588. The Turks and the Greek (they are identical in this list) are lazy, effeminate, sickly, and come out as the worst. There is a clear value-judgment added to the stereotypes. And this is exactly what I mean with power. The possibility to pass a value-judgment makes you powerful over the others. 1 Figure 1 shows a table from the early 18th century (ca. 1730-1740), the “Völkertafel”, an oil painting on canvas from Styria, at the Kammerhofmuseum in Bad Aussee. I would like to thank Franz Karl Stanzel, emeritus Professor at the English Department of the University of Graz, to have drawn my attention to this picture long ago. Orientalism/ Occidentalism 181 Take the Spanish, for example: we all know that they are proud, and they are seen here as “hoffärtig” proud and full of vainglory. And we still have these stereotypes. The same applies for the French, who are considered “leichtsinnig”, frivolous. We all know that. The way they make love, the way they drive cars. The Italians are “hinterhältig”, treacherous, deceiving. The Germans are “offenherzig”, trustworthy. The English are beautiful, “wohlgestalt”, the Swedish are strong and big, the Polish are “bäurisch”, boorish, uneducated perhaps. The Hungarians are disloyal and perfidious, the Muscavits are malicious. And the Turks and the Greeks are “wie das Aprilwetter”, changeable like April weather, whatever that might actually mean. So these are stereotypes with a long tradition. And they are all wrong. Bernhard Kettemann 182 the stereotypes, but still there is something to it. At some of the stereotypes we nod and say, ‘yes’. We should not do so. Figure 3: Portrayal of walking sticks of Viennese people from the 1880s (Photograph by Bernhard Kettemann, the Jewish Museum in Vienna, 2013) Now we are moving to a very serious part of stereotyping. The image in Fig.3 is a clear case of racism. This is a portrayal of walking sticks of Viennese people from the 1880s (Photograph by Bernhard Kettemann, in the Jewish Museum in Vienna 2013), which are fashioned as Jews by their disproportional nose design. This means that anti-Semitism was rampant in Vienna long before National Socialism. On 15 th March 1938, Hitler moved his troops into Austria and from then on we had official racism. My point is this: People have stereotypes - they might be private, they might be funny, but they are still powerful - and when these stereotypes are combined with an official policy of a state, then state-licenced racism is the result. It starts with nasty words and it ends with dead people. We have witnessed that very often in history and we see it now again in the world we live in. Continuing with Nazi history for a moment, the racial stereotypes and prejudices led to a law in Germany in 1935. Actually, it was passed on 15 th September 1935, at the Reichsparteitag of the NSDAP in Nuremberg. And this is why it is called ‘Die Nürnberger Gesetze’. This law classifies people, which is an impossible thing to do. The classification distinguishes the categories of “Deutschblütiger”, “Mischling 2. Grades”, and “Mischling 1. Grades, Jude”, meaning of German blood, of mixed blood 2 nd Degree, of mixed blood 1 st Degree and Jew. This law forbids the connection, sexual intercourse, or marriage between these different types of people because of Orientalism/ Occidentalism 183 their race 2 . Of course these are purely invented and constructed categories which do not exist in nature. Race is a cultural construction. Figure 4: Humiliation of Jews and mixed race couples Figure 4 (A photograph taken in Cuxhafen in 1933, Source: Keystone, München, http: / / www.sueddeutsche.de/ politik/ juden-im-nazi-deutsch land-alltaeglicher-hass-1.2487389-4) shows a couple of SA (“Sturmabteilung”) men publicly exposing a mixed race couple. The sign around the woman’s neck says ‘Ich bin am Ort das größte Schwein und lass mich nur mit Juden ein’. ‘I am the biggest pig at this place and only sleep with Jews’ [translation by the author]. And the man wears the sign saying: ‘Ich nehm‘ als Judenjunge immer nur deutsche Mädchen mit aufs Zimmer’. ‘As a Jewish boy I only sleep with German women’ [translation by the author]. Even though these people are merely in love with each other and have not committed any crime, they are publicly denounced. This is the result of stereotyping and of a state that turns those stereotypes into a state policy: into state organized or licensed racism. 2 Gesetz zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15.9.1935. 1. Verordnung vom 14.11.1935, verlautbart durch die Reichsgesetzblätter Nr. 100 vom 16.9.1935 und Nr. 125 vom 14.11.1935. Bernhard Kettemann 184 Figure 5: April 1 st , 1933, progroms against Jewish owned stores in Germany In Figure 5 (Source: Yad Vashem (Item ID 30312, Archival Signature 4613/ 224), Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, Hebrew edition, 1990, Public Domain) you can see what happened to Jewish stores in Germany on 1 st April 1933. They were boycotted and racial slurs were painted on their shop windows. This was the beginning of the exclusion of Jews from German society. We know about the ending. We do not only have racism in Germany or Austria, racism is everywhere in different forms and to different degrees. As is well known, there is also racism in the United States. Figure 6 (www.google.at/ imgres? imgurl=http: / / media,nola.com/ nolavie/ photo/ picrockwelljpg) shows a black girl, Ruby Bridges, 6 years old, painted in a picture by Norman Rockwell, entitled “The Problem We All Live With”. She was the first black girl to enter the all-white William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans, LA, in November 1960, guarded by four deputy marshals of the United States. The throwing of tomatoes and eggs and the term “nigger” on the wall indicate the violent racist reactions. This is a painting, but there are also photographs similar to it. Orientalism/ Occidentalism 185 Figure 6: Ruby Bridges, 6 years old, painted in a picture by Norman Rockwell, enti tled “The Problem We All Live With”. She was the first black girl to enter the all-white William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans, LA, in No vember 1960. Obviously, racism is not something that will go away, it is here to stay. It is in all of us. We are only lucky that we live in a nation/ country and in a time that does not use racism for its own political agenda. Still there are politicians who use xenophobia to increase their reach. ‘Neue Wohnungen statt neue Moscheen’ (new apartments instead of new mosques) is a racist slogan used by a certain political party in Austria in order to gain votes. Barack Obama said (quoted in the Chicago Tribune, October 26, 2006), “Our politics at its best involves us recognizing ourselves in each other. And our politics at its worst are when we see immigrants or women or blacks or gays or Mexicans as somehow separate, apart from us.” Fig.7 below (https/ / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ File: Wallace_at_University_ of_Alabama_edit2.jpg) shows the deputy attorney general of the United States, Nicholas Katzenbach, arguing with George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, in order to convince him to admit two black students to university. This happened at the door of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa Campus on 11 th June 1963. The attorney general told the governor that the law requires to admit those two clearly qualified black students. In the end Governor Wallace stepped aside. This tells us a lot about the importance of the rule of law in Western democracies. Bernhard Kettemann 186 Figure 7: Governor Wallace blocking the door of the University of Alabama at Tusca loosa Campus on 11th June 1963.(Source: https/ / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ File: Wallace_at_University_of_Alabama_edit2.jpg) Let us move to another stereotypical construction of the other, this time concerning the Orient. How come that Western Europe was able to construct the Orient? First, we need to take a look back into history, to the explorers in Europe. The first were the Portuguese in the 15 th century. The Portuguese King Henry the Seafarer encouraged exploration of the South Atlantic along the coast of West Africa. In 1482 the Portuguese reached the mouth of the Congo, in 1487 Bartolomeu Diaz sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India. Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas for the Spanish crown in 1492, in the same year as the Catholic Kings, Isabella of Castile and Fernando of Aragón, completed the Reconquista of Spain from the Arabs (Fall of Granada). Columbus discovered the islands in the Caribbean, and later on the Spanish conquistadores moved into Middle and South America and took the gold and silver there. Potosi is a city in Peru, which still has an active silver mine, which was started to be heavily (this refers to the death toll) exploited by the Spanish in 1545. This phase in the history of Spain can still be seen today when looking at Spanish churches that have golden and silver altars in the middle of formerly Arabic, Muslim mosques. The main churches in Seville, Granada, and Cordoba have retained their arabesque architecture as mosques with Catholic churches built into or beside them. The year 1492 was an important moment in Spanish history because the country was united under the Catholic Kings. They expulsed the Muslims Orientalism/ Occidentalism 187 and with them the Jews. The inquisition started its gruesome work to make sure everybody became Catholic. How did England become so powerful after Portugal, Spain and France? In 1588, the Spanish king decided that he had enough of the British buccaneering and pirating of his ships that travelled from America with silver and gold (John Hawkins, Francis Drake). He wanted to defeat Britain and he sent the biggest fleet ever, the Spanish Armada, into the English Channel. The fleet gathered in the French harbour of Boulogne. However, bad weather, good English naval tactics and better ships combined for a defeat of the Spanish Armada. About two or three decades after that, the Spanish did no longer play an important role on the seas, but certain stereotypes remained as shown in Figure 1, where the Spanish are still described as very powerful, important and proud. In 1588, the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British started the rise of the British who increasingly ruled the seas. Two hundred years later, there was no other fleet as powerful as the British. The British established the power to run a kind of triangular trade between America, England and Africa and later on also around Africa with India. Basically, they started from a British port with certain finished goods from Britain, like shovels, axes, guns etc., they sold those in Africa in order to buy slaves, they brought those slaves to the West Indies and America, and from America they brought cotton, sugar, coffee, tobacco from the south and oil and lumber, wood, and furs from the north back to England. England was the first European country to have sugar. Before, till around 1600, the Occident imported sugar from the Orient as a luxury item. Then the English started to import sugar from the West Indies. Continental Europe did not have sugar until a long time after that because it was very expensive. Only with the introduction of the sugar beet in about 1800 did we, on the continent, actually get cheap sugar. So the English had sugar with their tea long before us; the tea they imported from India, just as textiles (especially Calico, a cotton material [from Calicut or Calcutta] for cheap, colourful Indian dresses that were made by printing the colour on the material and not by colouring the material for the dress). Silk, pearls and precious stones were also imported from India. From around the middle of the 18 th century on, Britain was at the forefront of all kinds of economic, industrial and cultural developments in Europe. At the end of that period she replaced France as the most powerful country (Trafalgar 1805 and Waterloo 1815) in Europe and the world, just as two hundred years before Spain. This meant the power to reach other countries and force them into trade with Britain, at the advantage of the British and this led from real power also to a symbolic power over these countries and peoples. This is the basis of anthropology and ethnography as European sciences of dealing with other people - this power led to descriptions of other cultures and to a Bernhard Kettemann 188 certain way of dealing with other cultures from the position of the power of knowledge. And this made it possible for the West to create an episteme that we call, following Edward Said’s book (1978, New York: Pantheon Books), Orientalism. 2. Orientalism In order to introduce the concept, I will use a few quotes from Said (1978/ 2003): Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. […] Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. [...] the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient [...] despite or beyond any correspondences, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (Quotes from Edward Said (2003). Orientalism. London: Penguin. 1-3 and 5). What Said (2003: 5) introduces in his book is the idea of Orientalism as a discourse and the concept of the construction of the other by those holding symbolic power, “despite or beyond any correspondences, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient”. You will notice the similarity to the definition of the stereotype from the beginning of the paper. Orientalism/ Occidentalism 189 The construction of the Orient by the Occident probably started in earnest with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798-1799. Even though he conquered Cairo, his campaign was militarily not very successful, because the British destroyed his fleet and cut off his troops from France. He left Egypt through Syria and then went back to France, but he had many artists, archaeologists, linguists and scientists with him who started to explore the Orient as they saw it, once they were there. When they were back in France, they started to work on their impressions and their materials collected. Together with Romanticism this generated a lot of interest in the public and in academia, thus creating an episteme. Part of this was linguistic. In 1799, French soldiers found the Rosetta stone, a black basalt slab with an inscription in three languages: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic. This made it possible for Champillon in 1822, building on the work of other European linguists, to decipher the hieroglyphs. He opened a new field of research: Egyptology. This is just one example of the creation of a new episteme about the Orient. Possessing symbolic power, writing books about it, and not all of them on a scientific basis. Orientalism is also represented in the arts. The following picture dates from 1814 and is by Jean-Auguste Ingres, an important and famous French painter, and is entitled “Grande Odalisque”. The picture is now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Figure 8: Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814 (Source: https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Grande_Odalisque) What is shown here is a beautiful woman who lies naked. She conveys an idea of idleness and sensuality, the idea of the Orient. Ingres portrays here an odalisque in languid pose, seen from behind with distorted proportions. The small head, the long back, the big thigh and the elongated right arm, holding the handle of a fan in her hand, point to possible sexual allusions. Bernhard Kettemann 190 The painting draws on several earlier European paintings, e.g. Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Madame Récamier (1809). This is thus a good example of the Occident constructing the Orient without any correspondence with the “real” Orient. Instead, there is a specific discourse in the arts etc. about the imagined Orient. Figure 9: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (1870), in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. (Source: https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ The_Snake_Charmer) The painting in Figure 9 shows a boy, about 12 years old, handling a snake, perhaps a python. This boy is naked and we see him from the back. He is actually at the centre of the picture, looking at his audience in the back of the picture, sitting on the floor, their backs against a wall. The wall is a representation of arabesque azulejos with inscriptions on the top. There might be a hint of homoeroticism and paedophilia in this set-up, which is made acceptable through the oriental setting. The paintings in Figure 8 and Figure 9 display a society accepting naked women and naked boys, implying a sexualized and also paedophilic society, which is morally unacceptable in Victorian England. The message of these paintings is that the Occident can have it all: the voyeuristic satisfaction of the male gaze and the imperialistic and colonial feeling of cultural superiority. The picture in Figure 9 shows a naked floor and naked walls with no furniture. The people are sitting on the floor, which is regarded as uncivilized in European societies in 1870. Instead, in a Victorian living room, there are chairs, sofas, and other types of furniture. The idea of a nonfurnished room, as depicted in ‘The Snake charmer’ is “uncultured” from a Orientalism/ Occidentalism 191 Victorian point of view. Civilized people are supposed to sit on chairs. In a Victorian living room, even the plants are not on the floor, but on flowerstands. Nothing is actually on the floor except Persian rugs. The paintings above help to construct the East as the other, the uncultured from a European perspective, which implicitly comes with the right to impose “civilized” culture on the Orient. Europeans obviously got interested in Muslim otherness, because we are actually so close and so similar. The Venetian Republic was involved with Arabs for over a thousand years till it ended in 1797 with Napoleon’s victory. In 1815, the Venetian Republic became part of Austria, with Venice as the most important Mediterranean port in Europe. Muslims had dominated the Mediterranean for a long time; from 632 till 1492 they were actually part of Western Europe in Spain. They tried to conquer not only Spain, but also France, where, in 732, they were defeated by Charles Martell at Tours and Poitiers. That is not exactly the north of France, but far inside France coming from the south. The Arabs dominated Western Europe for a long time, till 1492, when the Spanish kings conquered the last Muslim capital in Spain, Granada. In 1571, the fleet of the Ottoman Empire was destroyed at Lepanto and in 1770 the Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Kesime. In 1683, that is not that long ago, the Ottoman army besieged Vienna and was destroyed by a German and Polish army. In 1827 the Ottoman fleet was destroyed at Navarino, off the Peloponnese in Greece, and two years later, in 1829 Greece became independent of the Ottoman Empire. Muslims had a very important and wide-ranging impact on Europe for over a thousand years which can also be seen in the impact of Arabic on European languages. There are a number of words that are derived from Arabic, such as admiral, alcohol, algebra, algorism, apricot, astronomy, average, azure, carat the measurement for gold and precious stones, this is actually the weight of one semen of the pomegranate -, crimson, geometry, ginger, hazard, henna, marzipan, mathematics, mattress, medicine - Arab medicine was far ahead of European medicine -, saffron, scarlet, sugar, syrup, tariff, and zero (to name but a few). Europe has a long history of contact with the Arab world and this is the reason we construct it as the other, according to our idea of the people there. Still today, the Orient is constructed according to the Western ideas of it and not according to the realities of the Orient. Bernhard Kettemann 192 Figure 10: President Erdogan displayed on the front page of The Economist, June 14, 2013. Figure 10 shows an image of President Erdogan displayed on the front page of The Economist, June 14, 2013. This picture made the title page after the Turkish upheaval when Gezi park was occupied by people protesting against his leadership and government. The Economist is a quality magazine, and it depicts Erdogan as a sultan, a stereotypical image of the Orient. The gas mask in his hand makes reference to the use of tear-gas by the police in Istanbul. In bold print a question accompanies this picture: democrat or sultan? The answer clearly is: sultan, because of the lack of basic democratic rights in Turkey. This is another example of how the West constructs itself as superior. One more example of ongoing stereotyping. Fig. 11 shows a picture from the Kleine Zeitung, Graz, May 15, 2013, accompanying an article about Islamists in Egypt. These are young Muslims, shouting, and they hold a Koran. This is the idea that we are producing: they are extremists, they are not democratic, they are dangerous, fanatic, uneducated, etc. Orientalism/ Occidentalism 193 Figure 11: A picture from the Kleine Zeitung, Graz, May 15, 2013, accompanying an article about Islamists in Egypt. The person who analyzed this concept first was Edward Said in 1978, as we have seen above. He discussed the Western construction of the Orient, with the West being actually part of the Orient. We (Europeans) just do not believe it. The Orient has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image or ideal and personality. Orientalism is a style of thought, based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions, made between the Orient and the Occident. Many writers, poets, novelists, philosophers, theorists have accepted the basic distinction between east and west as a fact. They developed an episteme about the Orient, its peoples, customs, and minds. Clearly, this is a case of stereotyping and creating prejudices over hundreds of years, including science, and scientific institutions, not just in the general public. 3. Occidentalism Currently there is a move towards the opposite of Orientalism, Occidentalism, which was discussed in depth in Ian Buruma’s and Avishai Margalit’s (2004) book Occidentalism. The authors define Occidentalism as follows: Occidentalism is the belief that the Western (or "Occidental") way of life is inherently, irreparably base and depraved, and that anyone living a Western lifestyle has become less than human. The first and foundational belief of Bernhard Kettemann 194 Occidentalists is that the West has been destroyed by its materialism. We've all heard this critique: Westerners have replaced Spiritual authenticity with the empty worship of money and property. As a result, the Western lifestyle is soulless. The cosmopolitan city the 21st-century Babel is the setting for our desolation. The second central element of Occidentalism is opposition to the very idea of a liberal bourgeois society where individuals follow their own interests under the rule of law. The atomised individual with rights and desires is, for Occidentalists, the wrong focus for human society. Instead, faith and spirit should determine a collective agenda that is right even if the mediocre multitude happens to reject it. Obliterate this unnatural, decadent Western condition and return to a mythicised past, and only then can this monstrous rupture be healed. (Source: “The sinister doctrine that links al-Qa'ida and Wagner - Edward Said warned against Orientalism. Now a new study exposes its other face.” By Johann Hari, The Independent on Sunday, 15 August 2004, ABC 31.) Before you can kill somebody, you have to make this person inhuman. This is what happened to the Jews, and this is what is now happening to the people in the West. They are depicted as inhuman, unworthy of living, because of their way of living. The West has been destroyed by its materialism, Western lifestyle is soulless. There is a strong opposition to the very idea of enlightened, liberal, democratic, bourgeois society. This is what people in the West supposedly believe in: a liberal bourgeois society, democracy, free will, where individuals follow their own interests under the rule of law. The cosmopolitan city is the setting of that desolation. This is why people who enjoy this lifestyle have to be punished and killed, as we have seen in the tragedy of Paris on November 13, 2015 and all the later tragic events in Belgium, Germany etc. Occidentalism is stereotyping the West, just as West did before with Orientalism, as a form of intellectual destruction. This is exactly what was done to the Orient. And now it is coming back to West, and in some cases it involves physical destruction. First, you kill by the word, then you kill by the sword as for example IS, Boko Haram and Al Quaeda do. Their origins go further back beyond the late 1970s when Osama bin Laden first made himself noticed. There is a historical irony in Occidentalism because it goes back to before the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, right to the Middle Ages. What the West is faced with now is actually a movement in the world that is directed against Western lifestyle. The Occident did it to the Orient and now it is the other way around: reductionist stereotyping. But this time, it is us, who are being reduced. Figure 12 shows an example of this new development, a protest in Denmark. Orientalism/ Occidentalism 195 Figure 12: “Europe you will pay. Bin Laden is (the) way” Jylland Posten, Denmark (Source: http: / / www.theodoresworld.net/ pcfreezone/ Jylland_Posten_ Cartoon10.jpg) In literature there is a long list of authors, British and French, also a few Americans, who wrote books related to the Orient, such as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, but there are many more. Orientalism is not only in art, but also in literature. It is not only in the sciences but also in history-writing. Orientalism has been a pervasive episteme for over two hundred years in practically all areas of Western thought. Now the Orient is creating a representation of us: The Western way of life is inherently and irreparably base and depraved and anyone living a Western lifestyle has become uncultured. What Occidentalism does is to diminish an entire society in this way to “a mass of decadent, moneygrabbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites in a form of intellectual destruction.” (Johann Hari, The Independent on Sunday, 15 August 2004, ABC 31). So what can be noticed again is, that first people are injured verbally, intellectually, and then physically. We have seen this in many, many cases. Thus, Occidentalism is against enlightenment, against everything that the West got through the French Revolution, egalitarian, liberal bourgeois society, against Western lifestyle. The Orient strikes back. This also shows that the Western assumption of a coherent world view and cultural integrity is under attack. But this is again the idea that the Western view decides what culture is. And if somebody else decides what culture is, then the West will have a problem. Bernhard Kettemann 196 References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Assmann, Jan. 2000. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Globalization. The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia UP. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Language et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bottom, William, Dejun Kong & Zhan Zhang. 2007. The Palimpsestic Syndrome in Management Research: Stereotypes and the Obliteration Process. [Online: apps.olin.wustl.edu/ workingpapers/ pdf/ 2007-01-002.pdf] Buruma, Ian & Avishai Margalit. 2003. Occidentalism. London: Atlantic Books Eagleton, Terry. 2000. The Idea of Culture. London: Blackwell. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the self. In Luther Martin, Huck Gutman & Patrick Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 2008. Die Hauptwerke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hall, Stuart (ed.). ¹1997/ ²2013. Representation. (Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices). London: Sage. Hari, Johann. 2004. The sinister doctrine that links al-Qa'ida and Wagner - Edward Said warned against Orientalism. Now a new study exposes its other face. The Independent on Sunday, 15 August 2004. Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture's Consequences Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations. London: Sage. McClure, John. 1985. Problematic presence: the colonial other in Kipling and Conrad. In David Dabydeen (ed.), The Black Presence in English Literature, 154-167. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McLuhan, Marshall & Bruce Powers. 1989. The Global Village. Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Lippman, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Scott, Nick. 2014. The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 39 (2): 175-184. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271-313. London: Macmillan. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1997. Europäer: ein imagologischer Essay. Heidelberg: Winter. Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin: An essay in appreciation of conlangs and the land of the red dragon “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 1. Introduction It is easy to imagine how Wales is particularly accommodating to the fantastic both in geo-cultural and socio-narratological terms, but perhaps less so in linguistic terms, at least at first glance. A recent event that took place at the Senedd, home to the National Assembly for Wales, serves as a surprising albeit potent anecdotal entry point to the linguistic realms of the fantastic that can be found in the Land of the Red Dragon. In July 2015, Shadow Minister for Health and Social Services, Conservative AM Darren Millar directed a series of questions with regards to Cardiff Airport to his fellow AM, Edwina Hart, Labour Minister for Business, Enterprise, Technology and Science. His query was prompted by an apparent increase of reports on unidentified flying objects at the airport ever since it had been nationalised by the Welsh government in 2006. Among other things, Mr Millar wanted to know how many reports of UFO sightings there were on an annual basis and whether the National Assembly was taking measures in conjunction with the Ministry of Defence to uncover the source of these sightings. Such a query was bound to be met with a response that would diverge from the everyday, technocratic discourse of politics; and, it was promptly answered. A spokesperson for Mrs Hart responded with, “jang vIDa je due luq. 'ach ghotvam'e' QI'yaH devolve qaS” (bbc.com). Translated, it reads as, “The minister will reply in due course. However, this is a nondevolved matter” (ibid.). The response was written in Klingon, a language constructed for the once antagonistic aliens, and allegorical stand-ins for the Soviets in the immensely popular Star Trek universe. Having had his personal close encounter of the third kind, Mr Millar retorted: “I’ve always suspected that Labour ministers came from another planet. This response confirms it” (ibid.). The peculiarity of this exchange prompted news organisations and outlets around the world to go on record in stating that this incident is believed to have been the very first of any government using an alien language for official communication. As it is the case with many constructed languages—conlangs—that are devised for dramatic and often estranging effect in popular culture, the origins of Klingon are a testimony to the fact that the function of a language Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 198 can preceed its form. In other words, what began with individual phonemes being cobbled together into a cluster of unintelligible syllables, which resembled ‘warrior grunts’ in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise 1971), soon became a full language. Marc Okrand, who earned his PhD in linguistics and Native American languages from Berkeley, was hired to develop the language more systematically. Today, Klingon is considered one of the most comprehensive and fully functional languages which were originally created for works of fiction. The Klingon corpus encompasses a growing vocabulary, which is collected in a series of dictionaries, its own orthography (Okrand 1992, 1997), and a number of classics translated into Klingon; the most important among them is Hamlet (Schoen 2000), which was even put on stage, or the Epic of Gilgamesh (Cheesbro 2003). Managed by Okrand, the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) also offers college-level language courses and certificates in Klingon. It currently oversees an ongoing translation project of the bible into what some consider to be “a sort of Warrior Esperanto” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 45). The number of speakers of Klingon will not outnumber the speakers of Cymraeg any time soon, and the interrelation of the two languages might be tangential at best. Still, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Welsh can already be heard in outer space since it became one of the 55 languages that were included on the ‘Golden Record’ onboard NASA’s Voyager probes. Even so, what is perhaps better documented is the latter’s influence on the prolific conlanging work of J.R.R. Tolkien. The elvish language of Sindarin is particularly indebted to Welsh and Tolkien’s work as a professor of Anglo-Saxon. Sindarin along with other languages spoken and written in Middle-earth, such as Quenya (modelled on Finnish) or Khuzdul (influenced by Hebrew and Arabic), point to the fact that, occasionally, language form comes before language function. In other words, while Klingon was devised for dramatic purposes in a fictional world that had already been created and imagined, “Tolkien first created languages then invented worlds, discourses and roles so that his creations could run free” (Lo Bianco 2004: 12). These two examples of conlangs make the Land of the Red Dragon both a metaphorical and a literal junction for positioning a sociolinguistic appreciation of the role of language in the fantastic, and of conlangs and conlanging in particular. After all, the discourse of the fantastic has the capability of literalising the metaphoric. Combining the basic tenets of reader-response criticism with sociolinguistic tools, we aim to furnish both an appreciation as well as an appraisal of languages, and their effects and affects in fantastic storytelling. The role that language plays in achieving the necessary degrees of estrangement are often taken for granted. Even so, neologisms—the mode’s “signa novi” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 13)—along with the aforementioned capacity of literalising the metaphoric are but two of the signature strategies “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 199 of the fantastic that allow us to make familiar the (e)strange(ed) and unfamiliar. The fantastic allows us to do that despite our imagination being constrained by the fact that we cannot imagine that which we do not know yet; this also goes for languages. The cognitive validation of the referent remains key in order to give meaning to that which appears alien or otherworldly. A loss of cognition means a loss of meaning. A similar caveat, i.e. a Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativism that more often than not translates into anthropocentric normativity, ‘haunts’ conlangs, many of which have become irrevocably tied to the popularity and reach of their respective worlds. While Klingon and Sindarin are the most widely known examples, the fantastic is arguably a fertile ground for conlangs since it teems with them. Other examples range from the rather well-known languages, such as Dothraki (Game of Thrones), Na’vi (Avatar), and Newspeak (Nineteen Eighty- Four), to the perhaps more obscure ones of Láadan (Native Tongue-series), Karhidish (The Left Hand of Darkness), and Nadsat (A Clockwork Orange). Despite the prolific work of conlang artists/ creators, and despite a long history of linguistic interest in created languages, linguists are in surprising disregard of conglangs. In part, this is due to distinctions and hierarchies of presumed privilege and power (e.g. created vs. constructed languages) which are unequivocally biased towards languages like Ro, Lojban, Esperanto, and other international auxiliary languages (IALs) that bespeak ‘serious’ endeavours of universal communication. It comes at the cost of charging ‘low-brow’, popular forms as being merely playful and even cultish. Instead of coyly sidestepping these caveats and structures of privilege, we aim to address them head-on in our efforts to rehabilitate the relevance of languages that originate in imaginary futures as well as mythic pasts. All distinctions aside, conlangs and other created languages share the same historical trajectory from a linguistic point of view. To that effect, we will offer a complemental case study of the influences of Welsh on Sindarin. It will serve to underscore the potential of socio-linguistic research that happens at the juncture of cultural and literary studies. 2. Language and the workings of the fantastic The fantastic works primarily through language. Language is used to make strange the familiar only to then make the estranged familiar again by way of a discourse of plausibility and cognition. Preeminent science fiction scholar Darko Suvin defined the workings of the fantastic as a mode “whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition [short: cognitive estrangement]” (1980: 7-8). In this sense, cognition can be equated with reasoning and understanding. For those who are unaccustomed to reading/ watching/ playing fantastic texts, Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 200 the cognitive shifts of estrangement that they engender may prove formidable challenges. While the language that is employed in such texts is still largely ‘ordinary’—too much estrangement almost inevitably translates into a loss of understanding—its usage may indeed be peculiar and strange, or, at the very least, estranging. Neologisms and literalised metaphors (see below) allow us access the workings of the fantastic through language in its most condensed form. When we engage with the fantastic, we expect to encounter new words for ‘strange’ objects, events, bodies, circumstances and more, which are unfamiliar to us in our primary reality, our “empirical environment” (Suvin 1979: 37). The words used and the referents they describe, are new to us regardless of whether they refer to seemingly archaic and mythical pasts, the uncanny found in tales of horror and the supernatural, or the imitated discourse of science that lends a sufficient degree of plausibility to science fiction scenarios. Even so, they must always stand in a discoverable and recognisable relationship to our everyday reality so that they can be cognitively validated in a process of extrapolation. The signa novi of the fantastic are thus key to setting into motion the simultaneous processes of estrangement and cognition. Performing “a paradoxical function”, no doubt, they point to a “dialectic trope that implies a conception, at once aesthetic and cognitive, of the difference between the historically familiar and the asyet imaginary designs and social relations that are supposedly just emerging” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 13). Even though neologisms are a key component and a constituent device of the fantastic, their number, form, and density is rather limited lest understanding is endangered. Fantastic neology oscillates along a spectrum that extends between the use of familiar words for strange or new objects, bodies, concepts and more, and the invention of entirely new words that “have no histories” (ibid.: 19). However, too much neological play or innovation stands a good chance of quickly alienating the reader/ viewer/ player. While we expect and perhaps even crave the new and the strange in a fantastic text, the text and thus the author always have to make it possible for us to supply meaning on our own accord based on what we find in the text and what we bring to the reading. Even though this might include the creation and implementation of an entirely new language, the use of neologisms, especially their form, usually remains constrained. For example, William C. Spruiell conducted a systematic study of neology in SF texts, emphasising that neological processes follow a “contact-borrowing paradigm” (1996: 447). He concluded that most neologisms are nouns and adjectives, which describe objects and especially honorifics, while there is a distinct absence of alien verbs (ibid.: 441-448). By way of a more detailed explanation, he offers that comprehending new nouns has certain advantages. Authors seem to have it easier in inventing new nominals just “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 201 as much as they seem to disrupt the cognitive processes of the readers less than verbs. In short, “neological nouns allow the narrative syntax to remain familiar, while creating the impression of exotic detail” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 13). New verbs, on the other hand, “signify more than a difference in condition; every new kind of action presupposes a world changed to make it possible” (ibid.: 38). Consequently, engaging with the fantastic takes on qualities of a language contact situation. Fictive neologies follow a model that is analogous to how real-world speakers encounter real-world foreign languages. As we will see, the same applies to conlangs as well. This just goes to show as to what we stand to learn by looking at the fantastic through a set of linguistic lenses. It serves to remember that while neological play and creativity may put a strain on those engaging with the fantastic, the effects of neology are encountered by speakers of nearly every imaginable language on a daily basis. In the ‘real world’, neologisms are primarily encountered in three often intersecting discursive spheres, namely 1) technical knowledge, 2) artistic innovation and social exchange, and 3) other sources of ‘new knowledge’ and the means of access to them (ibid.: 14-18). Technical neologisms are fuelled by the need for precision and greatly reduced ambiguity combined with a sufficiently narrow range of application to referents, and increased learnability. New words that are generated by way of artistic and social processes are often loanwords as much as straightforwardly invented terms. The main source of many neologisms can be found in advertising and other commercial discourse. They often serve to make “the new referent seem fresh and interesting, yet also easy to employ in everyday exchanges” (ibid.: 16). Slang, and other forms of sub-/ countercultural appropriation, are perhaps among the most potent sources for words to express ‘new knowledge’. Slanging—i.e. the active creation and use of slang—as well as the creolisation of terms signify the “power of détournement, wresting control of normal language and using it for a group’s own purposes” (ibid.: 16-17). For example, such “street-level lexicogenesis” was turned into the cornerstone of an entire sub-genre in the fantastic tradition (ibid.). Cyberpunk, a term that functions as a label for this subgenre, exemplifies neological processes both in our everyday world as well as in realms of the fantastic. As William Gibson, who is considered the progenitor of cyberpunk, wrote in his short story Burning Chrome (1982), which became the basis for his genre-defining novel Neuromancer, “the street finds its own uses for things” (2010: 562). New words “call attention to themselves” since they are “artful”, and, more importantly, they point to the “linguistic power of their users” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 14). It is, for instance, such power structures that make the critical engagement with the fantastic from a linguistic point of view all the more rewarding. Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 202 Unlike other modes of storytelling, the way how language can be used in the fantastic may produce instances where the metaphorical becomes literal(ised). SF author and critic Samuel R. Delany initially did the most to introduce the fantastic to the ‘linguistic turn’ as early as the 1970s. In an expanding series of essays and book chapters, he argued that the genredefining use of language is tied to and made distinctive by its level of subjunctivity. Going through a painstaking process of analysing word-series in fantastic as well as non-fantastic texts, he opines that “[s]ubjunctivity is the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to borrow Saussure’s term for ‘word’: ) sound-image and sound-image” (1977: 43). He goes on to exemplify how different modes of word-series convey different meanings. What he labels “reportage”, says “this happened” (ibid., original emphasis). Naturalistic fiction puts forth something that “could have happened” (ibid.). An occurrence in fantasy proper “could not have happened”, but, we hasten to add, happened anyway, whereas in science fiction, he argues, it “has not happened” (ibid. 44). The latter also encompasses, “might happen, will not happen, has not happened yet, could have happened in the past but did not” (ibid.). The final permutation ties back to the same occurrence in fantasy proper. It underscores that what Delany had initially thought to be a deterministic definition for the distinctiveness of SF as a genre, then became an excellent elaboration on genre/ mode as a fluid process, especially as regards the fantastic, and how it is coded in the use of language. For example, an expression such as ‘her world exploded’ can only ever be a metaphor for emotional distress, and perhaps a cliché at that, in reportage and naturalistic fiction. In the fantastic, it must be given the benefit of the doubt that it could be a literal occurrence as it was visually realised when Princess Leia’s world, Alderaan, was pulverised by the Death Star in Star Wars (Lucas 1977). However, rather than a genre-distinctive rule, the literalisation of metaphor is a genre tendency. As Mark Bould reminds us, it could only be a rule if the fantastic “were free from clichéd prose and dead metaphors” (2009: 232). While running the risk of stating the obvious, fantastic storytelling does of course not extrapolate its estrangement ‘seriously’ regardless of whether we look at SF, fantasy proper, or horror. At the same time, this lack of seriousness implicitly fuels charges that are commonly brought against a more comprehensive appreciation of the use of language in the fantastic from a linguistic point of view. The discourse of superficial plausibility, which is both prerequisite and bane of achieving understanding, is the main source of interference. Overall, critiques of the fantastic imagination tend to be overshadowed by the deceivingly ‘more correct’ or ‘more serious’ use of scientific imaginings, especially in SF. In short, a more casual linguistic approach may come to the premature conclusion that the fantastic takes the laws of physics more serious than the laws of language. This does not hold “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 203 up to scrutiny at closer examination. It is not so much that the fantastic “imitates the laws of language, but that it plays with them” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 29). This play is inherently ironic regardless of whether it affects the laws of gravity, time or language. It serves to acknowledge and even embrace the inherent irony in the fantastic imagination rather than using it as a convenient avenue for creating distinctions and hierarchies of presumed privilege which have arguably sidelined the fantastic from being exposed to the ‘linguistic gaze’ for too long. The intellectually stimulating potential of irony can be made accessible by way of one of the most often-cited ur-texts of the fantastic, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Utopia seems to be concerned with the discovery of a new world—a good/ other place. Later, the term became equated with similar, usually more future-oriented quests for a better world and society, especially in SF texts. However, utopias in general only pretend to be concerned with the future or a new form of social order when, in fact, they often advocate a disguised, reactionary, and thus ironic return to and resuscitation of an idealised ‘golden age’ of the past. More’s Utopia is a product of the Renaissance’s fascination with Antiquity and the exotic Other initially introduced to Europe via Eastern trade routes. Once again, this manifests most clearly in neology. “The names of officials, places, and neighbouring nations (not to mention ‘Utopia’ itself) are poetic transformations of Greek words that probably would have been familiar to a learned reader in 1516” (ibid.: 35). Such an example points back to the fact that no matter how fantastic the use of language, and its referents, appears to be, there always has to be a cognitive grounding in the perception of our primary reality. Consequently, there is in fact a lot that an intrepid (xeno-) linguist might find intriguing, stimulating and, indeed, even problematic in the fantastic. 3. (Xeno-)Linguistics, (xeno-)linguists, and the fantastic The role of language in (e)strange(d) situations of communication and the study thereof are frequently thematised and even personified in the fantastic. Such scenarios can be grouped together roughly along two lines: 1) human/ non-human communication, and 2) linguistic relativism. However, while the range of fantastic stories about language, communication, (xeno-) linguistics and the work of linguists is rather broad, a great many stories are positioned within a narrower frame of the available spectrum. Painting in broad strokes, this is largely due to anthropocentric normativity that overshadows many of these narratives. It is further hampered by the wilful inability of many authors/ creators of fantastic texts to accept the likelihood of communication with non-human life being ultimately not possible; and, Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 204 there is an unwillingness to learn from the likely incompatibility of languages. Scenarios of human/ alien communication find Whorfian relativism literalised as a modus operandi. This broad norm belies the aforementioned anthropocentrism along with ethnocentric cosmologies in which national languages “are represented unreflectively as the natural ones shared by the text and reader” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 34). The alien Other not only refers to extraterrestrial and/ or synthetic life forms, who we expect to encounter in a large range of SF stories, but also encompasses other fantastic non-human entities, ranging from dwarves and fairies to golems and apparitions of any kind. A great many language contact situations are predicated on the presupposition that any form of language—conceivable by the human imagination—can be reduced to a series of universally applicable characteristics and qualities. In other words, they “reflect the assumption that (verbalized) languages are all reducible to a basic stratum, a pure code capable of infinite varieties of incarnation with no loss of essential information, on the principle that all minds must share certain universal principles transcending biological and cultural difference” (ibid., emphasis added). The Star Trek universe offers a compelling example. Despite the high density and diversity of humanoid life it purports to offer, there are arguably few employment opportunities for xeno-linguists; the occasional need for an interpreter/ translator who is fluent in Klingon, Romulan, or any other language of ‘major’ interstellar powers aside. The plausible in-world explanation for the relative ease of inter-species communication rests on “one [tenuous] historical claim and a technological solution”, the latter being a science fictional novum and the neologism to define it: Star Trek’s famed universal translator (Jones 2010: 131). The tenuous historical (pseudo)explanation Star Trek offers, pertains to a singular episode in which the origin of most humanoid species in the known universe is intimated to have one common biological ancestor. However, this ‘progenitor storyline’ is never developed further. The universal translator (UT), on the other hand, is a story staple. This fantastic technology exemplifies the anthropocentric conceit that affects so much of the fantastic. Human languages are constrained by the uncomfortably narrow evolutionary reality that our communication is co-dependent on a species-specific physical and cognitive apparatus (e.g. the human larynx, the human ear, the human brain). As Jones reminds us, “[h]umans speak primarily in allophones, but think in phonemes. […] Most languages have 30 to 40 of the about 200 possible phonemes that exist collectively in all human languages” (ibid.: 136). Would it not be much more likely that your average ET, orc, dwarf, or any other fantastic entity—humanoid or not—evolved differently, even if only slightly, and thus be capable of a different range of communication? “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 205 Limits appear rather quickly when we begin to imagine non-humanoid life seriously. Authors such as Stanisław Lem and Ted Chiang arguably did the most in speculating more soberingly about the imagined realities of language contact situations. In his novel Solaris (1961), Lem chronicles the futile attempts of a group of astronauts and scientists to establish meaningful communication with a sentient ocean that covers an alien world. Needless to say, all attempts fail. The intrepid researchers “generate a library’s worth of scientific neologisms, each one taxonomically well formed, but capable only of signifying their distance from their incomprehensible referents” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 34). Lem all but “ridicules the anthropocentric presumption of scientific attitudes […] that draw the universe in the image of humanity [even] the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics” (Bould 2009: 225). In his short story Story of Your Life (1998), which was recently adapted to film in Arrival (Villeneuve 2016), Chiang also offers a humanalien first contact situation. Alien beings visit Earth and attempt to communicate with humanity. The so-called heptapods are non-humanoid and quickly baffle the teams of physicists and linguists who are deployed around the globe to figure out a way to communicate with them. What puzzles the researchers the most is the fact that heptapods seem to use two completely different codes, dubbed Heptapod A and B, for spoken and written communication. The first breakthrough occurs when the heptapods react to a particular set of mathematical equations—Fermat’s Principle of Least Time—which we consider integral calculus whereas the heptapods react to it as if it were simple algebra. With this information, a linguist, who is both protagonist and narrator, begins to understand that while human language, physics and thus our cosmology is “causal”, the heptapods speak, write and think in “variational” principles which point to the latter’s “simultaneous mode of consciousness” (2002: 27-32). Particularly when writing Heptapod B, the linguist begins to realise that the way she thinks was changing. For her, “thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice as we say in the trade, my thoughts were phonologically coded”. Practicing Heptapod B changed her “thoughts, [they] weren’t expressed with [her] internal voice; instead, [she] saw semagrams with [her] mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane” (ibid.: 25-26). Instead of being constrained by sequentiality, the heptapods act, speak, and write “to create […] to enact chronology” (ibid.: 33). While her exposure to the heptapods changes her consciousness, it does not mean that she experiences “reality the way the heptapod does. [Her] mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages” (ibid.: 35). Even so, Chang’s story still embraces another common denominator that applies to many fantastic stories concerned with language and communication: linguistic relativism; that is Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 206 how a different language code makes us see and conceptualise our reality differently. A relatively broad Sapir-Whorfian common denominator of linguistic relativism informs how the fantastic imagines cultures and species as being determined by their language(s). More specifically, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis encapsulates “the idea that the language that people speak affects the way that they think” (Cheyne 2008: 395). This manifests in stories that range from languages becoming weaponised to languages as a means for political empowerment and gender equality; in short, social engineering by way of linguistic means (cf. Bould 2009: 229; Jones 2010: 135-136). For example, in his short story Gulf (1949), author Robert A. Heinlein speculates about how the development of a new language—Speedtalk—has contributed to the evolution of humanity. It purports to be “structured as much like the real world [without] the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs [since our cosmos] does not contain ‘noun things’ and ‘verb things’; it contains space-time events and relationships between them” (1977: 69). Mark Bould suggests that “Heinlein clings to the notion of a fixed extralinguistic reality to which ‘superior’ beings can make language more closely conform” (2009: 228). Author Suzette Haden Elgin offers a much more detailed treatment of the empowering and liberating capabilities of language in her Native Tongue series. Her novels are set in a hyperpatriarchal/ masculine future where women have been reduced to being little more than appendices to men. The evolving story chronicles how women go ahead and invent the language Láadan. Built on only 18 phonemes, it serves to counteract the masculine language of domination by way of making calculated use of pronouns and unambiguous use of emotional discourse. On the dystopian end of the spectrum, we find potent mediations on language in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Orwell’s totalitarian society is made possible largely by way of control of the media in conjunction with the use of the official language, Newspeak. It is key to produce and maintain a static, unquestioning society through, among other measures, the number of words that can be used. Newspeak speaks to the “threat of rationalized language narrowing until it prevents imagination” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 33). Burgess’s teenage sub-/ counterculture is characterised by their use of their argot, Nadsat. At first glance, the obvious influence of Russian on Nadsat is often mistakenly seen as a pointer to a Russian occupation that possibly happened at one point in the past of the dystopian England where the novel is set. However, Burgess, who was a polyglot, had a distinct affinity for Russian. Actually, as a “lyrically mongrelized Russian by bullyboys”, Nadsat subverts the Orwellian associations of Russia, and it “reverses the expected clichés of anti-Russian feeling by showing that the “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 207 Russian language can be used precisely to facilitate freedom” (ibid.: 32). The fantastic offers us even scenarios that go beyond using language as an Orwellian means for social control. Linguistic relativism is also capitalised on in order to showcase that a language may also become weaponised. This is what Samuel R. Delany proffers in his novel Babel-17 (1966). During an interstellar war, one faction develops what the opposing faction initially believes to be just a code to encrypt messages. This code turns out to be a fully developed language which, if learned, turns the learner into a traitor. Mark Bould opines that Babel-17 is one of the most “paranoid versions of linguistic determinism” (2009: 229). The fantastic is an intellectually stimulating sandbox for exploring—in extrapolated form—substantial epistemological questions that permeate virtually every academic discipline. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series offers the notion of psychohistory. It allows historians and social engineers to use statistics to predict and then make manifest a certain desirable future on a galactic scale, affecting the lives of a quintillion people. Once again, Stanisław Lem offers substance for the intrepid (xeno-)linguist. In his novel The Futurological Congress (1971), his protagonist is introduced to the science of futurolinguistics by Professor Trottelreiner, who acts as his guide. Futurolinguistics is the study of projected language change and its possibly self-fulfilling effects on the perception of reality. The professor explains its workings as follows: A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes, and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting. Give me a word, any word. Myself. Myself ? . . . My, self, mine, mind. Mynd. Thy mind — thynd. Like ego, theego. And we makes wego. . . . We’re speaking first of the possibility of the merging of the mynd with the thynd, in other words the fusion of two psychic entities. Secondly, the wego. Most interesting. A collective consciousness. Produced perhaps by the multiple dissociation of personality, a mygraine. (1985: 109) While Lem’s novel is very much tongue-in-cheek, parodying a range of SF tropes, there remains “a certain grotesque realism in the notion that linguistic invention can predict—and by predicting, generate—an infinite proliferation of material possibilities” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 30). The latent realism in a story like Lem’s stems from both the attraction of exploratory, neological play and the relatively long history of linguists’ interest in language change and language creation/ construction. As already Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 208 established, the reason why the fantastic is particularly conducive to linguistic experimentation, fostering a proliferation of invented languages, is tied to the discourses of the strange, estranged, and estranging that inform this storytelling mode. The relatively recent proliferation of fiction-based conlangs thus makes for an enticing avenue for linguistic endeavours in the future which should not be surprising given the fact that, historically, linguists have long held a fascination for such language experiments. 4. A short, ‘otherwordly’ history of linguistics and conlangs Fiction-based conlangs are but another chapter in a historio-linguistic narrative which confirms that the creation and construction of languages, and the study thereof, have drawn the attention of linguists at least since early modernity. They take their place in a long line of xenoglossic endeavours that were often fuelled by the Faustian quest for universal human communication. These endeavours began as early as the late Renaissance, came of age during the Enlightenment, and finally saw their heyday during most of the 19th and early 20th century. Even so, conlangs tend to be sidelined and even disregarded by academia which speaks to both distinctions and hierarchies of presumed privilege and power. At this point, it serves to remind ourselves that “[t]he creation of language is a source of power” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 18). Consequently, the use of (xeno-) linguistic power which, if not wielded by those who see themselves as its arbiters, may be seen by some as an encroachment upon the legitimacy and officialdom that is the prerogative of ‘orthodox’ linguists. This is somewhat ironic in that there is a large segment of linguistics that deals critically with issues such as language and power, minority languages and language revitalization. Even so, artistic language enthusiasts tend to be denied ‘access’ whether they have ‘proper’ training in linguistics or not. In order to counter what is largely an imagined encroachment, the tools of privileged academic discourse have been employed to create terminological and taxonomic distinctions. They are based on the purpose of, intentions behind, and completeness of created/ constructed languages. While sidestepping key contextual dimensions, some of these distinctions have been used to separate conlangs from more ‘serious’ endeavours of language creation. This has left conlangs and conlanging a fruitful and relevant area of linguistic exploration. After all, even the most cursory look at the xenoglossic history combined with a more inclusive terminological toolbox go a long way to rehabilitate conlangs as part of a linguistic ecology which is perhaps best showcased by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sindarin. Next to natural/ naturally-occurring languages, there are thousands of created/ constructed languages many of which are only partially developed. “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 209 There is a three-tiered framework for classifying them: 1) a priori languages, 2) a posteriori languages, and 3) adapted or modified natural languages (Lo Bianco 2004: 8). It is possible to position fiction-based conlangs and the practice of conlanging at intersections of all three tiers especially when viewed through a historical lens; and, it only makes sense since conlangs are very much a part of rather than separate from this perpetual indeed organic process that we call ‘language’. A priori languages go through an ab ovo genesis with new symbols and signs being developed just for it. A great many of them “are based on claims that the elements are universally understandable across human cultures, or that they are easily learned and globally valid” (ibid.: 9). However, they tend to forbid exceptions to their rules and “pay little regard to the relevant extra-linguistic contexts” (ibid.) which means that despite their claims to universality they often fail as international auxiliary languages (IALs). A posteriori languages build on and adapt elements from already existing languages, both natural and artificial. Language creation projects that fall into this category attest to “a more pragmatic acceptance that a constructed language should not expect all present language users to abandon their existing speech or writing practices and adopt totally new ones in the pursuit of an ideal espoused by the language inventor” (ibid.). In short, they tend to take extra-linguistic contexts more seriously. So do languages that are the products of making modifications and adaptations to already existing natural languages. They usually “aim to help an existing speech community adapt to altered and more challenging social environments”, for example endangered or dead languages (ibid.). This also includes language reforms and the modification of languages for special purposes (e.g. Basic English, SeaSpeak). The 17th century saw the first well-documented and comprehensive attempts of constructing languages. They were fuelled in part by a religious zeal to find a universal human tongue which later gave way to a universal humanism during the heyday of the Enlightenment and then saw a shift from universalism to international communication in the 19th century. Francis Lodwick put forth a proposal in A Common Writing (1647) in which he sought to modify key words in English in such a way that speakers from any European language background could at least read what he labeled ‘radical words’. His scheme was one of many that followed in his wake which all aimed at finding “a system of universal signs that would mark ideas common to all people in all cultures” (Lo Bianco 2004: 9). Many of these projects tried to satisfy two underlying desires. On the one hand, projects like Lodwick’s or Bishop John Wilkins’s attempts to establish the ‘real character’ of things through language belied an almost Faustian quest to retrieve the pre-Babel language. On the other hand, other projects, some of which even enthused philosophers such as René Decartes or Gottfried Leibnitz, were motivated by more practical and philosophical goals to find a Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 210 more ‘modern’ replacement for Latin. Both proved to be futile efforts. With the onset of the 19th century, utopian motivations took hold and worked towards consolidating European culture though language in order to “prevent the destructive competition of modernizing nationalism from destroying Europe itself” (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 35). However, after 1860, there was a perceptible shift from finding the universal language to constructing international languages many of which maintained a latent utopianism. These language construction movements extended well into the 20th century, ranging from Volapük to Interlingua. Of course, Esperanto arguably became one of the most successful IALs. Its chief creator, Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, stated that it was in part politically motivated as means for achieving “peace, tolerance and human unity” (Large 1985: 78). The logical language movement rose concurrently with the development of IALs. Ro, developed by Ohio Reverent Edward Foster at the turn of the 20th century, serves as an early example. Logical languages were constructed primarily with the aim to reduce ambiguity as much as possible, and some of them also served as a proving ground to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. James Cook Brown developed Loglan in the 1950s which was followed by similar languages like Lojban, Lojsk, and Ceqli. Loglan is particularly interesting since it intersects directly with the fantastic. Not only was it mentioned and incorporated in two of Robert A. Heinlein’s SF novels, but Brown also authored a utopian novel himself, The Troika Incident (1970), in which Loglan is part of the world-building. By the middle of the 20th century J.R.R. Tolkien had already constructed his languages of Middle-earth which saw their first fan-based use in the 1970s. There has been a proliferation of conlangs since then which was greatly spurred by the Internet; so much so that the wiki Langmaker.com, founded by Jeffrey Henning, listed over 1800 constructed languages in 2009 (Chenye 2008: 388). Principle photography for a documentary film titled Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues began recently in 2015. Consequently, the question can be raised as to why there seems to be a lack of interest in fiction-based conlangs from a linguistic point of view; also, if there is critical engagement with conlangs, why does it stay restricted to the fringes of what might be called ‘popular linguistics’? A charge that is brought against fiction-based conlangs, at least implicitly, has to do with the fact that they tend to be (mis)perceived as products of the entertainment industry in the broadest sense. More explicitly, this bias translates into conlangs being either placed vis-à-vis other created/ artificial languages, or they are investigated solely within the (con)text of the fantastic. The latter vantage point usually does not attract linguists. However, positioning them on equal footing with other created/ artificial languages often leaves them found wanting from a linguistic point of view. Assessments of conlangs in terms of “real-world “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 211 linguistics” then also expose the implicit bias against them since they are seen as either not serving “the purposes of practical communication”, or their creators are “criticized for not developing their invented languages in more detail” (ibid.: 389-390). Neither position is fair, and they both belie a lack of knowledge of how language(s) are employed in and by the fantastic. Numbers also matter. Since fiction-based conlangs are popular, recruiting their speakers from large groups of invested readers/ viewers, i.e. fans, there is something to be said about there likely being more speakers of Klingon or Sindarin than Loglan. Ria Cheyne comes to the conclusion that conlangs and conlanging have to be approached “on their own terms”, and thus avoid “giving preferential treatment to created languages that happen to fit the models used for real-world constructed languages” (ibid.: 390). We chose to present our arguments in the same vein and also went beyond that by offering a decidedly interdisciplinary appreciation of the language of the fantastic and conlangs in that we imported tools of literary studies into a sociolinguistic framework. Harking back to the point of our departure once again, it serves to remember that while language(s) and word formations are used in strange and estranging ways to achieve the effects of the fantastic, their referent(s) must always stand in a discoverable relationship with our primary reality lest understanding is endangered. The resulting meanings and interrelations are multifaceted and multidimensional. Consequently, conlangs, particularly those that are a posteriori languages, enjoy referential links to extra-textual linguistic dimensions. For example, developing Klingon, Mark Okrand drew on Native American languages in order to make it more difficult to learn from an Anglo- European point of view. Klingon is agglutinative, which is a common characteristic of his referent languages. Tolkien’s “rigorous use of linguistic knowledge” in developing Sindarin, and its subsequent indebtedness to the Welsh language—even transcending purely linguistic boundaries—arguably make it an even better showcase for a critical appreciation of conlangs (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 29). 5. ‘Conlang’ case study: The Welsh influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages While also a linguist and professor of Old English at Oxford University, J.R.R. Tolkien is a name most commonly associated with the popularisation of fantasy literature in the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, his bestknown contributions, The Lord of the Rings 1 (1954-1955), The Hobbit 2 (1937) 1 LotR in short. 2 TH in short. Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 212 and the posthumously published fictional mythology The Silmarillion 3 (1977), are widely considered outstanding examples of world-building in the fantastic. Part of what renders these stories such well-rounded attractions to readers and viewers alike, 4 lies in Tolkien’s realistic portrayal of his constructed languages. He created them specifically for his Legendarium, i.e. the above corpus of texts set in the fictional world of Middle-earth, which is home to humans, elves, dwarves, dragons, hobbits and other fantastic creatures. Deep forests, old castles, “well-tended fields and meadows”, paint a romantic landscape in the minds of his readers (Tolkien 1995: 89). Although meant to describe fictional Middle-earth, these words would apply to the Welsh countryside just as well; but landscapes are far from the only inspiration Tolkien drew from Cymru. For this case study, we will relate Sindarin to its roots in Welsh. Sindarin is the vernacular spoken by the elves in the Third Age, i.e. the timeframe in which TH and LotR are placed. Tolkien purposely modelled it on Welsh with regard to grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary (2006: 197). The other extensively developed elvish language, Quenya, has by that time become mostly an academic jargon for scholarly research. It draws more on Finnish than Welsh, and serves as a comparison to Sindarin especially when situating them in the elvish language tree. By means of this case study, we aim to showcase the complexity of Tolkien’s conlangs by looking at the similarities between Welsh and Sindarin to unpack the range of influence of the former on the latter. 5.1 Grammar The grammatical phenomenon of mutation stands out when comparing Sindarin to Welsh. Phonologically speaking, consonant mutations are based on the process of lenition. Lenition is one of the most characteristic grammatical features of Celtic languages, including Welsh. The mutational process describes the consonant change at the beginning of a word in certain circumstances. Welsh differentiates between three kinds of lenition: soft, nasal, and aspirate mutation, of which soft mutation occurs most frequently (Hooker 2012: xxiv-xxvi). Assimilation is similar to lenition in that it also refers to a change in pronunciation while it does not have a grammatical function. A phenomenon of connected speech, the process simplifies sound combinations that would be too difficult to pronounce in their natural state (ibid.: xxi). 3 TS in short. 4 The Lord of the Rings was adapted as a movie trilogy by director Peter Jackson in 2001- 2003, followed by a set of three Hobbit movies in 2012-2014. “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 213 When Tolkien adapted Welsh for Sindarin, he transferred five out of nine cases of soft mutation almost without alterations: Table 1: Transferrals of soft mutation from Welsh to Sindarin with little to no change (cf. Hooker xxvii). Welsh Sindarin B > F B > V C > G C > G M > F M > V P > B P > B T > D T > D The Welsh B > F and M > F become B > V and M > V in Sindarin which indicate a change only on the orthographic level, as the Welsh / f/ and the Sindarin / v/ are both pronounced [v]. Other changes are more profound; for instance, the Welsh D > Dh vanishes almost entirely, except for a “nonce use” in the Histories of Middle-earth (1983-1996), a posthumously published anthology of Tolkien’s material relating to Middle-earth (Hooker 2012: xxvii). He gives the Sindarin example of dinen becoming dhinen in the compound Dor Dhinen ‘Silent Land’, which again displays Tolkien’s method of transferring pronunciation rules on a phonetic and an orthographic level. The Welsh / dd/ and the Sindarin / dh/ are both realised as voiced dental fricatives. Likewise, the Sindarin GW > W approximates the Welsh mutation G > Ø in that the latter occurs most frequently in the combination [g] and [w]. For instance, in soft mutation, the Welsh region Gwynedd becomes Wynedd, just like the Sindarin gwain ‘new’ becomes wain in the compound Naurwain ‘January’ (lit. ‘new fire’). Welsh mutations that are not featured in Sindarin are LL > L because the sound / ɬ/ does not exist in Sindarin, and RH > R for the same reason. Tolkien inserted an S > H lenition in Sindarin that does not exist in Welsh (ibid.: xxv-xxvii). He thus transferred the soft mutation but allowed for alterations to render them a better fit within the constructed language. However, the rules of applying soft mutation differ. While Welsh has about thirty grammatical situations that require soft mutation, the exact rules about the same process in Sindarin are unknown. All Tolkien says on the matter is that the Sindarin and Welsh lenitions are meant to be similar “in phonetic origin and grammatical use” (Carpenter 1977: 471). Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 214 Sindarin also contains various examples of assimilation. Like lenition, assimilation serves to simplify spoken language by making it more economical and fluent to articulate. When the adjective morn ‘black’ and the noun dor ‘land’ together assimilate into the land Mordor, they render a more streamlined pronunciation of the rather strenuous *Morndor (Hooker 2012: xxi). Tolkien also uses this feature to indicate linguistic changes over time that happen when one variety evolves differently than another from the same original language. Compared to the other elven variety Quenya, Sindarin is the language more commonly used in Middle-earth in the Third Age. It has thus undergone a few linguistic changes that have not occurred in the rarely used Quenya. Ennor, Sindarin for ‘Middle-earth’, is Endóre in Quenya. Tolkien postulates that ng, nd, mb changed into simpler forms like m or nn whereas ng changed phonologically (1995: 1089). We find the same feature in Welsh where, for instance, the adjective doeth ‘wise’ turns into annoeth ‘unwise’ when undergoing negative prefixation. By including lenition and assimilation in a constructed language, Tolkien showcases enthusiasm for and expertise in linguistics. Assimilation, in particular, is a process usually associated with spoken rather than written languages, which does not necessarily mean that Tolkien intended for his constructed language(s) to be spoken by the readers of his books. Rather, it amplifies the level of detail that went into the construction in order to render his languages more realistic. 5.2 Pronunciation Tolkien considers Welsh a language with a “powerfully individual phonetic aesthetic” (Carpenter 1977: 364). He “deliberately devised” Sindarin to resemble Welsh, while not being identical with it, and yet still share a similar “linguistic character”including pronunciation rules (ibid.: 194), as the following table shows: Table 2: Comparison of similar pronunciation rules in Welsh and Sindarin (cf. Tolkien 1995: 1087-1090). Welsh Sindarin c is always realised as the velar plosive / k/ and never as / s/ which in English is usually the case when it is followed by e or i. c is always realised as / k/ . Tolkien specifically points out the fact that this includes e and i, probably with his English-speaking audience in mind (Tolkien 1995, 1087). “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 215 The pronunciation of ch is closer to German than English conventions. The word ‘bach’, a homograph of the German word for a small river, means ‘little’ in Welsh but is pronounced the same, ch thus being realised as the velar fricative / x/ . Sindarin realises ch in exactly the same way as Welsh or German do, which Tolkien again references in the ‘Appendix to Writing and Spelling’ at the end of LOTR (ibid.). The voiced dental fricative, a characteristic sound of English, can also be found in Welsh, where it is rendered dd (instead of th). / ð/ also found its way into Sindarin pronunciation, where it is written dh. It almost serves as a bridge between the Welsh dd and the English th. g is always realised as a velar plosive, never as a voiced palatoalveolar affricate. The same rule applies to g in Sindarin. w is realised as / ʊ/ which turns the diphthong aw into / aʊ/ . The diphthongs au and aw are both pronounced / aʊ/ . While the phonetic systems of the two languages are not identical, they nonetheless bear enough similarities to notice an intentional resemblance bolstered by Tolkien’s passion for Welsh phonology. He chose to incorporate the characteristic sounds of Welsh into Sindarin and to create a pleasant sense of estrangement that is made visible in his texts. The English original is presented by the author as a translation from the lingua franca of Middleearth (‘Westron’) so as to further invoke an epic ambiance for the reader. If Middle-earth’s trade language is likened to English, and Sindarin is the other language most commonly encountered in the texts, the linguistic parallels between Sindarin and Welsh are reflected on a sociolinguistic level. The language with the melodic, slightly exotic sound is the one associated with myths, fairy-tales, and elves, whereas the everyday language remains in use for everyday business. 5.3 Vocabulary Most similarities in words stem from the fact that Tolkien utilised existing Welsh words for Sindarin and simply coated them with a veneer of new meaning. On a meta-level of lexical influence, we can also discover the categorisation of the Celtic language tree in the elvish languages. Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 216 Tolkien drew on Celtic languages as a general source of inspiration for his constructed elvish languages. This becomes clear when taking into consideration the distinction of P-Celtic and Q-Celtic into the analysis of his linguistic creativity. The designations are used to differentiate between Brittonic (P-Celtic) and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) varieties. The former includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton, whereas the latter are comprised of Manx, Scottish and Irish Gaelic (Hooker 2012: xxii). The distinction is made because in each language branch, the Proto-Celtic *kw developed differently. In one branch, it remained close to the original, Latin-inspired *kw, resulting in the Q-Celtic varieties. Example words include the Irish ceathair, ‘four’, or ceann, ‘head’. In contrast, these two words transformed into the Welsh pedwar and pen, respectively (ibid.). A similar differentiation based on linguistic evolution can be made between Sindarin and Quenya. Even though Tolkien never specified which language came first, implying that their differences are of local rather than temporal reasons, he developed Quenya first. Its sounds and words are inspired by Finnish rather than Welsh. When placed vis-à-vis Noldorin (the precursor of Sindarin in Tolkien’s language construction), a distinction similar to Pand Q-Celtic comes to light. Hooker cites two examples: the Quenya qáre and Noldorin paur for ‘fist’, and qesse and pesseg for ‘feather’. Both Sindarin/ Noldorin and Welsh are therefore P-varieties of their respective languages (ibid.: xxiii). The practical transfer of lexical items from Welsh to Sindarin is actually much simpler. Tolkien took real words from Welsh and applied them with a similar or slightly different meaning, sometimes turning them into new compounds that are only used in the fictional language. In some cases, the Sindarin words taken from Welsh even share a similar meaning. Aran can be translated as ‘high’ in both languages but differs in its applied use. In Welsh, ‘aran’ is mostly seen in place names such as mountains, referring to the concrete height of an object. In the constructed language, Tolkien uses the word to refer to an abstract concept of ‘high’ (ibid.: 245). He glosses ar(a)with “high, noble, royal” in the linguistic appendix of The Silmarillion (Tolkien 2001: 356). Found mostly in names, it is also the root of aran ‘king’. While the lexeme is definitely related in meaning in both languages, it is used in compounds with differing concepts. Welsh is also a key influence on Tolkien’s creation of Sindarin names. If translated into Welsh, the words would have a different meaning than in Sindarin. Barahir, a name common enough in the Legendarium to be given to three different characters, can be glossed as baras ‘fiery’ and hîr ‘lord’. The name not only implies the elevated social status of its bearer(s) but also carries the flair of heroic deeds and legacies. To a Welsh speaker, however, it must undoubtedly sound strange to have the name of a valiant warrior “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 217 consist of the words bara and hir—‘Long Bread’ has, so far, eluded any anthology of heroic names. Some cases, such as Perhael, are all but hidden in the text and their Welsh roots only come to the fore when dissecting the word. In this example, the compound structure of Pêr ‘sweet’ and hael ‘generous’ aptly describes the personality of their bearer, who is better known as Samwise Gamgee. His Sindarin name rarely appears in the running text, but, when it does, it also discloses yet another example of the Sindarin-turned-Welsh lenition as Perhael becomes a Berhael following the preposition ‘and’ (Tolkien 1995: 932). In Sindarin, Tolkien glosses Perhael as ‘half-wise’. This comes with another notable difference: While the word appears as the conventional translation of a name in Sindarin, it cannot appear in the same fashion in Welsh. Analysing its two components as if they comprised a compound helped us to reach a working translation, but it also reveals that Perhael would not be a feasible compound in Welsh. Tolkien makes ample use of this practice of creating compounds out of real components when transferring words with Welsh roots into the Sindarin corpus. The three fields of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary make tangible the connection between Welsh and Sindarin, but the examples that were discussed by no means exhaust the Welsh influence on and references in Tolkien’s work. Apart from using the language as a model for Sindarin, words of Welsh origin also found their way into the stories as place names, character names, and mythological concepts. The Carrock is a sharp rock formation that resembles carreg, Welsh for ‘stone’. The original name for the dragon Smaug from TH is Pryftan which translates literally into ‘worm of fire’ in Welsh. Annwn not only resembles the Sindarin Annûn, but is also the Otherworld of Welsh mythology. It is located in the West and, among others, inhabited by mythological water maidens. Tolkien borrowed the concept for a place called Henneth Annûn, which translates into ‘Window of the Sunset’ and is hidden behind a waterfall. Both connotations are incorporated: water and the west (Hooker 2012: 190-191). This example displays how Tolkien not only drew on the Welsh language, but also combined the linguistic influence with a nod towards the mythological wealth of Wales, and of Celtic countries at large. 6. Conclusion Tolkien’s linguistic knowledge is the foundation upon which his conlangs are built. His intricate use of Welsh proves that, despite his affection for the aesthetic value of its phonetic components, his rendition of Sindarin is reduced not only to a phonetic mimicry of Welsh. The conlang also approximates Welsh from a lexical and grammatical perspective. In Vanessa Erat and Stefan Rabitsch 218 addition, its sociolinguistic characterisation - and that of its speakers - can be likened to Wales and Welsh culture by means of mythological elements that have been incorporated, or geographical features that are prevalent in the Peter Jackson movie adaptations of LotR (2001-2003) and TH (2012-2014). When Gandalf exclaims on screen that Bilbo Baggins was “born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire”, the same geographic description brings the iconic landscape of Wales to mind: rich in greens, rivers and softly rolling hills. “The Road goes ever on and on/ Down from the door where it began,” Bilbo sings when he leaves his home for the last time in LotR (1995: 35), and, while he might reminisce about the adventures of his youth (the plot of TH), including the epic confrontation with the golden-scaled dragon Smaug, we might as well wonder if he is not off to adventures in the Land of the Red Dragon. Sindarin meets key criteria of an a posteriori language by drawing on elements of Welsh. Building bridges between reality and the fantastic, it is a prime example of linguistic (re-)construction by estranging the ordinary. Welsh is used in more ways than one to achieve that effect. It can be the source language of a conlang, which in the case of Tolkien’s Sindarin translates into a cornucopia of phonetic, grammatical and lexical references. First and foremost, however, it is the language of a country rich in myths and mythology, leaving ample room to assimilate the fantastic. It should not be too big of a surprise that members of the National Assembly respond to queries in Klingon, or that fantasy authors embrace the Welsh aesthetic for constructing fictional languages. References Print Bould, Mark. 2009. Language and linguistics. In Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts & Sherryl Vint (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 225-235. New York: Routledge. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen and Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey (ed.). 1981. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Allen and Unwin. Cheesbro, Richard. 2003. Gilgamesh: A Klingon Translation. Rockville: Wildside Press. Cheyne, Ria. 2008. Created languages in Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 35: 386-403. Chiang, Ted. 2002. Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Tor. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, Samuel R. 1977. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown: Dragon Press. “Croeso i Gymru” - where they speak Klingon and Sindarin 219 Gibson, William. 2010. Burning chrome. In Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham & Carol McGuirk (eds.), The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, 547-565. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Heinlein, Robert A. 1977. Gulf. Assignment in Eternity. London: NEL. Hooker, Mark T. 2012. Tolkien and Welsh. Tolkien a Chymraeg. Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Use of Welsh in his Legendarium. Leipzig: Llyfrawr. Jones, Richard R. 2010. Course in federation linguistics. In Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (ed.), Star Trek as Myth, 129-143. Jefferson: McFarland. Large, Andrew. 1985. The Artificial Language Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Lem, Stanisław. 1985. The Futurological Congress. San Diego: Harcourt. Lo Bianco, Joseph. 2004. Invented languages and new worlds. English Today 20 (2): 8- 18. Okrand, Marc. 1997. Klingon for the Galactic Traveler. New York: Pocket Books. Okrand, Marc. 1992. The Klingon Dictionary: English/ Klingon, Klingon English. New York: Pocket Books. Schoen, Lawrence. 2000. The Klingon Hamlet. New York: Pocket Books. Spruiell, William C. 1996. A lack of alien verbs: coinage in Science Fiction. In Alan K. Melby (ed.), The Twenty-Third LACUS Forum 1996, 441-452. Chapel Hill: Linguistic Assoc. of Canada and the United States. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1995 [1954-1955]. The Lord of the Rings. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Tolkien, J.R.R. 2001 [1977]. The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (First published by: George Allen & Unwin). Tolkien, J.R.R. 1998 [1937]. The Hobbit. London: Collins Modern Classic (First published by: George Allen & Unwin). Tolkien, J.R.R. 2006 [1983]. English and Welsh. In Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 162-197. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Web Pearson, Michael. Wales government answers UFO query in Klingon. CNN.com. 2015. <http: / / edition.cnn.com/ 2015/ 07/ 14/ world/ feat-klingon-wales-uforesponse/ >. Accessed 28 March 2016. ‘‘tlhlngan maH! ’ Welsh government responds to UFO question in Klingon.’ rt.com. 2015. <https: / / www.rt.com/ uk/ 272980-wales-ufo-tory-minister/ >. Accessed 28 March 2016. ‘Welsh government responds in Klingon to UFO airport query’. BBC.com. 2015. <http: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ uk-wales-33479808>. Accessed 28 March 2016. Margret Holt “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 1. Introduction In wishing to find an amusing but challenging graphic text especially for this commemorative volume for Prof. Allan James, the search lead to the discovery of Scorch. 1 This was a project initiated and promoted in 2013 by the Welsh Rugby Union 2 with a twofold aim: firstly to create a mascot appealing to children that would increase their interest in rugby and the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) ‘brand’ as well as encourage them to be more physically active themselves; secondly, in cooperation with the Education and Skills section of the Welsh Government, to promote literacy skills. 3 Scorch is the name given to the character of the dragon and main (visible, but silent) protagonist in a largely digital, multimedia and bilingual enterprise basically comprising a set of four comics with an optional sound track, in English and Welsh language versions. The WRU’s website offers merchandise devoted to Scorch. In connection with the New Literacy Drive (National Assembly for Wales, June, 2013), the first 22 page comic was offered to all primary and secondary schools in Wales and around one third responded and ordered the booklet. Discussing how those schools actually used it and the lasting, hopefully positive effects on literacy skills would go beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that, presumably, the Welsh language version will have been sent to Welsh language medium schools, and the English version made available to all. In fact, the English version has dialogue that breaks into Welsh on occasion, and the national anthem is, of course, sung in Welsh. Also, many, if not most people and especially children enjoy reading comics and as these have been so attractively produced, thanks to the authors and the graphics designers of Sunrise Productions (S.A.), 4 it can be assumed that they are and will be successful, 1 http: / / supporters.wru.co.uk/ scorch/ story.php (the Scorch comics) 2 It must be noted that throughout “rugby” refers to the rugby union game, NOT rugby league, football or any other form of ball game! 3 www.wru.co.uk/ eng/ news/ 27907.php#.Vq9o7eaLKSp (introduces the project: 22.8.13) accessed 12.1.16 4 www.sunriseproductions.tv/ sports/ scorch/ © 2016 accessed 25.2.16 Margret Holt 222 even if the project has not been repeated, due to the usual problem of lack of funding. Already mentioned are the two obvious aims of this production, but even a quick glance at the material demonstrates another aim, not explicitly claimed but evident nevertheless: that of promoting pride in Welsh identity and a specific ‘feeling’ of ‘Welshness’ which is closely connected to rugby football. There are many aspects or issues in the comics that could be discussed, but the scope of this paper permits only a few, and those only in a limited way. 2. Scorch the brand Apart from the first (promotion) print production of the comic, the following three in the series and everything in connection with them has been published digitally. As a multimedia enterprise the comics have an accompanying soundtrack spoken by local Welsh actors; there are DVDs, video games and the usual merchandise with a Scorch logo. Scorch is thus not only a character in the comics but also a brand. In public he appears as a mascot, that is to say as a person dressed up in dragon costume, at rugby matches 5 and in schools 6 presumably in a promotional exercise; in a complementary fashion the comics have included depictions of characters dressed in an almost carnivalesque manner with daffodil hats and national flag cloaks as rugby fans do for real rugby matches, particularly at very important tournaments. 7 Scorch is the symbolic character in the comics and video games, has his own blog on social media platforms (Twitter and Facebook), and fills the background to specific homepages of the WRU. And is a dragon. The dragon from the Welsh flag. 3. Dragons in literature, and significance in Welsh folklore and literature Dragons must be one of the oldest monster creations in the history of human kind. They have been attributed many and varied characteristics, shapes, types, and occur in the mythology and legends of nearly all cultures. They have been frequently associated with topographical features; occur in place names, as monuments, on inscriptions, crests, and on flags. In the Western world one of the most familiar legend types is the one of combat between dragon and hero. Various theories account for dragon legends, but what 5 www.youtube.com/ watch? v=NX4SRFSmolg (watch Scorch 25.9.2015) accessed 3.2.16 6 www.wru.co.uk/ scorch/ news/ 28769.php#VsLkhOaLKSo (..back to school..6.11.2013) accessed 3.2.16 7 www.google.at search welsh+rugby+supporters images “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 223 concerns us here is the mythological function as opposed to naturalistic, religious and historical functions, categories proposed by Jacqueline Simpson (Simpson 1978: 79-93). Dragons inspired awe and fear of the mysteries of natural and supernatural forces; thus, they were endowed with immense power, which they used to terrorise whole populations. They were poisonous (fire-breathing), rapacious, treasure hoarding, greedy, destructive, in short evil. Any (strong, young) man brave enough to fight and defeat one was made into a hero and later a leader, which gave him rights over land. To demonstrate his position, he was permitted to carry a standard or crest or seal that represented his power and rights, which became associated with tyranny and or conquest of an enemy or rival and control. However, such symbols performed useful functions; they stood for cohesion in a community and were “[the] embodiment of the whole community’s pride, its conviction that it is in some way superior or even unique” (ibid.: 86) and, on the other taught the value of courage. Dragon tales were always exciting, entertaining and memorable, and of psychological and cultural significance (ibid.). Collections of folklore tales offer several Welsh dragons, the most important one being y Ddraig Goch (the red dragon). Its origins and tales of a fight between a white and red dragon date from medieval Welsh manuscripts (Nennius: Historia Brittonum, 826 CE and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account Historia Regum Brittaniae from around 1136 CE) collections making up the Mabinogion written down by various scribes. The Mabinogion contains the tale of Lludd and Llefelys (cf. Jones 1949: 89-94; Ashe 1990: 131-133) in which a white dragon is fighting with a red; the dragons are eventually trapped, carried to a pit at Dinas Ffaraon (later Dinas Emrys) in Snowdonia and buried there; the tale continues with Merlin and Vortigern of Arthurian legend (cf. Layamon n.d.: 19; Wace n.d.: 147; Ashe 1990: 178-182), who excavates the dragons that then continue fighting. Eventually the red dragon defeats the white and the red dragon becomes a symbol for Vortigern’s people. In fact it was already a symbol of sovereignty and supremacy among the Celts: ‘Pen-dragon’ (Uther Pendragon, Vortigern’s rival) means ‘dragon’s head, or ‘chief of warriors’, and later Arthur, is raised to the ‘pendragonship’, and becomes King (Vinycomb 1909: 86-90). As for the white dragon, there are a number of connections to the Anglo-Saxons; the Bayeux Tapestry (11 th c), for example, depicts King Harold holding a staff with a golden or white wyvern (a two-legged, winged dragon). Thus, a possible story emerges of the long conflict between the Welsh and the English (or Anglo-Saxons). Today we have the red dragon on the Welsh flag and on governmental and other crests; the white dragon was used on the standards of Henry III, Edward I, Edward III and Henry V (ibid.), and has been used on numerous other occasions up to this day. Henry VII and the following Tudors, already using the red dragon on a Margret Holt 224 green and white background adopted the red dragon on their royal coats of arms together with a white dragon (ibid.). After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1801 the lion replaced the dragon (opposite the Scottish Unicorn), the red dragon was adopted as the royal badge of Wales in 1807. By 1959, the flag in its current form was officially adopted. Since then it has been used in the arts, sports and business to demonstrate pride in Welsh identity. 8 As far as children’s literature is concerned, there are thousands of dragons; however, there seem to be two directions for the way they have been employed. On the one hand, they still inspire fear and awe when it is a case of retelling or adapting ancient legends or folk tales, in dream and fantasy tales; on the other hand, they have been frequently tamed, enfeebled, even domesticated for those who prefer a protective view of children. There are pacifist, vegetarian, even cuddly dragons, thus made to join the menagerie of anthropomorphised animals familiar in books for children. They are used in clichéd ways as, for example, with the character of Idris the dragon 9 in the popular children’s Welsh TV animation production (originally from 1975-1977) of “IVOR THE ENGINE” directed by Oliver Postgate. However, there are authors such as Jane Yolen: Dove Isabeau (1997) who prefer the drama and the power of the dragon spirit that can be encouraged in the young (Hanlon 2003: 7-26). This is the case with Scorch where the protagonists are fearless and only too willing to take up the challenge that they are provided with. In any case, children enjoy the thrill and excitement of the ‘dangerous’. 4. About comics Maybe at this point it is important to mention what is being referred to as a ‘comic’. Comics, after a long period of having been dismissed as something inferior, infantile and unworthy of serious consideration, particularly in Britain and Europe, have in more recent decades finally been accepted as an important medium in their own right and worthy of academic analysis and research although theorists tend to disagree on a definition of the term. Scott McCloud suggests that although we may not like comics, their creation, their effect and their message makes them worthy of consideration. He sees them as an art form, and a cultural artefact: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/ or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 1993: 9). For him, the image 8 www.walesonline.co.uk/ lifestyle/ nostalgia/ welsh-dragon-most-important-object- 3012086? pageNumber=3 from 27.4.2013. accessed 15.2.16 9 https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=G5ZMNyscPcg Episode 2, 3 rd series. Uploaded 21.8.2006. accessed 4.2.16 “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 225 or succession of images becomes the narrative; also content and context are of importance. Will Eisner refers to comics as “sequential art” (Eisner 1985: 5) which puts them in the context of an art form we have known since time immemorial, from Egyptian pictogram writing to the 11 th century Bayeux Tapestry, from medieval narrative frescos to Hogarth’s satirical series, to 19 th century beginnings of comic series with Rodolphe Töpffer or Wilhelm Busch. The 20 th and 21 st centuries have seen a burgeoning and development of the medium to encompass many different genres, types, styles, themes and subject matters. Since they offer infinite possibilities, they allow cartoonists to push the limits of what can be done, with or without any text at all. McCloud further argues that comics are not a marginal art form but “central and persuasive”. Comics combine words and pictures using recognisable conventions and shared understandings between author/ artist and reader. ‘Conventions’ refers to the use of building blocks, from page to panel, the use of borders, different formats, graphics, styles, speech and thought balloons, sound effects and motion lines, text/ narrative/ information boxes and more, which are intuitively understood. Everything contributes to the overall meaning. McCloud maintains that although there should be a balance between images and written text, the narrative (pictorial text) should dominate, which is what we have in Scorch. 5. Analysis of Scorch the comics The Scorch comics have been produced in a British tradition, despite their creators coming from a different cultural background. The 4 different comics in the series are: the promotional Unleash the Dragon (UtD) by Brent Dawes & Willem Samuel. This is the longest in the series and the one that exposes the characters, situation and purpose. It also directs readers to what they can expect in the following three: (01) Dawn of the Dragons (DtD) by Sam Wilson & Chris Beukes, (02)The Duelling Dragons (DD) by Sam Wilson, and (03) The Dream Team (DT) by Sam Wilson & Chris Beukes that continue the adventures and bring them to a close. Many aspects are striking. To begin with, the title page is important since it creates an image that not only informs the reader but also catches their attention. It is highly detailed, containing all that is important in the entire series. It introduces the main characters in the foreground, most prominently the boy character who is going to be the most active; the drawings tell a great deal about each of the characters and the roles they will play in the series. Each of the objects they carry, a musical instrument, a rugby ball/ dragon egg, a map/ legend, as well as the dog called Legend will be vital. They are all running out of the picture towards the reader. Moving backwards into the image to the sides is some Margret Holt 226 kind of mystical mountainous forest (of the past) and behind that, in the upper centre in a kind of pinkish haze is the Principality Stadium crowned by a winged dragon. This illustration has the greatest degree of perspective, or depth in the whole comic series, and uses most of the colours that will occur subsequently. The title Scorch is three-dimensional, the face of the lettering in fiery red and yellow, and the sides appear as a scaly decoration; Unleash the Dragon is in white lettering. At the bottom right is the logo of the WRU as well as its web address in yellow on red. The reverse side of the title page is an advertisement for the WRU supporters’ club. Generally speaking, the graphics, format, colour and design of the comics leave a strong impression. They have been most attractively produced, with large bold, clearly drawn representations of the characters, places, situations and action to reflect the intended emotions. A clear colour code has been used: red dominates, but otherwise primary colours have been used to indicate specific meaning. Red is used for the background to the frames, for Scorch, and for the clothing of characters on the ‘winning team’: that is not just rugby players wearing kit, but the child protagonists with t-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps, and Merlin when he is a referee or rugby fan. Maybe this could almost be referred to as product placement, but that is understandable when one considers the publishers of the texts. Opponents are drawn in black, or grey; the time porthole/ vortex and dream bubbles are blue, the memory vortex, and situations or people somewhere in the memory vortex a shade of violet; the enemy dragon Iceborn is drawn in black contours filled in white or light greyish blue. This is not an exhaustive description of the use of colour, but it shows the significance of colour as a carrier of meaning. Cover pages of each comic feature one large illustration that to some extent depict what is to be expected within. Pages have mostly between 6 and 10 panels, except when a crisis or when something important is being shown. In this case the frame has another, significant colour, and the panel covers half a page or more. Panels are mostly rectangular, but sometimes of a different geometric shape, and superimposed on another or other panels for effect. The effect of the drawings is two-dimensional, although perspective is sometimes used. Much use is made of straight, jagged or curvy movement lines as well as onomatopoeia (whoosh, baboom, krrrk and so on) to indicate action, emotion or progress in the plot. Dialogue or thought is presented in speech or thought balloons, with stressed words in bold. Often speech or other effects are carried across several panels. Commentary or added information is in rectangular text boxes, but is kept to a minimum; one exception is a golden plaque beneath a supersize red Welsh dragon in the stadium’s changing room that spells out a poem and conundrum that will need to be solved. Merlin’s identity badge shows that he is “TOURGUIDE & WIZZARD” and displays his photo as the Disney Merlin and not as he is drawn in the comics. Mordred also appears in 2 “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 227 forms: the evil character of legend reflected in a (cracked) mirror: and in the adjacent panel as the commentator at the 1935 match. When characters lose their memory, their eyes turn blank, or pink. Thus the comics make use of many of the conventions mentioned in the section above. The characters are rather two-dimensional, not particularly developed apart perhaps from Merlin who is given some personality. A certain geometry becomes apparent in the three follow-up comics with several parallel opposing characters and forces: Merlin and Mordred, the dragons Scorch and Iceborn, Brân’s giants and the Stone giants and opposing rugby teams. However, the team of heroes forms a trio and there are also a few background extras to flesh out the plot. First and foremost, there are the 3 children, two boys and a girl of around 10-12 years of age. The reader does not discover their names until later in the series, but they are Rhys, Megan and Dylan, that bear some resemblance to the trio in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Rhys is a leader, like Harry, not hesitating to act when it is necessary; he also asks important questions that contribute to the progression of the plot. Megan could well be likened to Hermione; she is not only strong as she can rugby tackle as well as any lad, but she holds information such as a map and contributes with reasoned arguments. Dylan is a little like Ron; he is a ‘normal’ boy any teenager can relate to; he’s a little plump, sometimes slow on the uptake, and complains, objects and comments more than the other two. The illustrators have given each a different hair colour, (brown, blond and red), and, curiously, their eyes change colour over the four comics; they wear typical teenager clothes, jeans, t-shirts and trainers; Megan’s t-shirt carries the WRU logo, and she wears a hairclip that resembles a Welsh daffodil. Rhys wears a red sweat shirt with the logo. Dylan wears a red baseball cap with the peak turned round. In the first comic his cap has the Welsh dragon on a white background, later his cap is only red and bears the WRU’s logo, and he consistently has a two-tone green t-shirt and brown shorts and always sports a back-pack. Dylan is not as keen on having adventures as the other two, but plays his part nevertheless. Merlin is a magician and a shape-shifter and, importantly, has power over time. He is alternately a tour guide, the character Merlin of legend dressed as a medieval peasant or a monk, a rugby fan in a variety of apparel depending on the year/ era; thus, he changes his appearance most often. As Merlin, he plays the part of a mentor, but is drawn with a white beard, moustache and receding hairline, and has rounded facial features thus looking more like an absent-minded uncle or grandfather who is prone to getting things a little wrong. Merlin has a dog called Legend, he wears a red t-shirt some of the time and would appear to be some kind of terrier. This is fitting to the Merlin of this story. Merlin’s opponent is Mordred, an evil sorcerer with power over memory. He is always depicted wearing a long black gown, in the later comics with shoulder-pad armour, and his face Margret Holt 228 is drawn in black white and grey. His head is sharp and angular, with white streaked black hair combed back in a flamboyant manner indicating maybe vanity, or that he at least has an over-exaggerated opinion of himself. Other characters, such as Brân and his giants and the stone giants play a supporting role, others such as tourists, rugby players, a referee, supporters, help to fill the narrative. Not to forget the two opposing dragons, Scorch and Iceborn, who are symbolic and have no speaking part at all. The setting begins and ends in the present time, before an important rugby match, and subsequently mostly in or around the Millennium Stadium (now called Principality Stadium) in Cardiff, with excursions to significant places in Wales such as a mythical forest (undefined), a coal mine (undefined), Snowdon, or Cardiff at earlier times in history. There are multiple narrators, as if the plot is being thrown from one to the next, as in a rugby game; however, the main narrator is the character Merlin. The plot takes the form of a classic Arthurian quest adventure story with ingredients from fairy tales, science fiction (time travel) and fantasy; the heroes are the three youngsters. However, the plot-line is not linear; there are frequent instantaneous jumps from one time or place to another, and there are also unexplained or apparently illogical gaps in the narrative. This is a common feature of comics; but the reader is able to make the transitions intuitively. The action is fast, but easy to follow in its pictorial form. The reader follows the exploits of Megan, Rhys and Dylan, their mentor Merlin and his opponent Mordred. On reflection, it becomes clear that the action takes place on several levels and at different times: one or several different rugby matches are being played in the background to all the stories, and thus form the basis to the foreground conflicts being enacted. At the beginning the children are posed with the riddle of the dragon they have to solve in order to be able to complete the task they have been given by Merlin: to ‘unleash the dragon’. Merlin lives for rugby and for Wales, and he needs help from real people in order that rugby should enter another ‘golden age’. [This refers to the 1970s, an era when Wales dominated the game, (Johnes 2008: 132)]. Merlin is referring to the power of the dragon to fire Welsh players that they may once again dominate the game. It is implied that they were and are representing the whole nation. “BORN OF FIRE STRONG IN SCALE, THE MIGHTY DRAGON’S ROAR PREVAIL, PERCHED ALOFT ARENA’S HEIGHT, HIDDEN BUT ALWAYS IN PLAIN SIGHT. TO BREATHE AGAIN WHAT ONCE WAS WROTE, BY FATHER AND SON, NOTE FOR NOTE” (UtD. p 5) When Rhys touches the ‘portrait’ of the Welsh dragon, the three are sucked into a swirling time vortex and land somewhere in a forest in the Middle Ages. Thus begin their adventures; not only to free themselves from this situation, but to solve the riddle of the dragon. In a cottage in a clearing they meet Merlin who has been waiting for them. He is the instigator and director “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 229 of the plot, but the outcome is nevertheless uncertain. Merlin as time-keeper and agent uses his magic cauldron as a mirror to see into the past or the future and watch rugby games. Legend, Merlin’s dog, has a map that leads the children to the Sword in the Stone that no one can extract. The map contains another riddle, the solving of which entails finding a special tune which will release the sword. The magic cauldron shows them James James composing the tune to the Welsh national anthem in 1865 (James’ father, Evan wrote the lyrics); the children (having been transported through another time portal) provide him with the missing notes, which they of course know. Back at the cauldron, Merlin, now dressed as a rugby football fan, takes them to the stone, where Dylan is ‘volunteered’ to play the tune on a strange looking flute (possibly meant to be a pibgorn, a traditional Welsh musical instrument akin to a flute or pipe). This releases a dragon from under the rock. The dragon flies with them on her back to Snowdon; they follow her into the mountain to find that she has actually died a thousand years previously, but has laid an egg. 10 The egg looks much like a rugby ball. To hatch the egg, they need to access “the fires of the bowels of the earth”. On through the next time portal, they are seen playing rugby with this ball/ egg somewhere in the 19 th century if one is to go by the rugby kit the other players on the pitch are wearing. This connection in the plot is needed to get them to the entrance to a working coal mine, down which they go since it is the nearest they can get to the “bowels of the earth”. Merlin is following their progress by looking in his cauldron. Part of the mine collapses and the egg is dropped down the opening chasm; there is an explosion and up pops baby Scorch, who grows at an alarming speed. He rescues the children from the collapsing mine by pulling them out in a mining cart. At one point they take a flying leap across an enormous gap; in an illustration that is reminiscent of the scene in Peter Jackson’s film production of J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where the protagonists are being pursued by the Balrog in the Mines of Moria. While this is going on, Merlin is watching the same rugby match as before in his cauldron. The children re-emerge through the cauldron. Merlin does a disappearing act back through the cauldron and the children are released into the present and back to where they started from. They realise that the dragon is in fact always present since he is on the flag flying over the stadium. In the penultimate full page panel, Scorch is seen flying out of the flag and breathing fire to the sound of the Welsh national anthem. In the last frame, Scorch presides in glory over the stadium. The children have succeeded in unleashing his power. 10 This makes use of legends referring to the origins of dragons as well as the origin of the Welsh dragon. Margret Holt 230 The three following issues take up the story and follow it along legendary lines. In Dawn of the Dragons Mordred makes an appearance, whose aim is to destroy rugby football altogether, something he has been trying to do for centuries, because he wants to dominate the kingdom of Wales. He reasons that if he can eliminate something as meaningful to the Welsh as rugby, then they will lose their spirit and be easy to manipulate and rule. As he has power over memory, everyone else has to avoid his darts of forgetfulness, represented by mauve-coloured mini-explosions in the illustrations. He travels back and forth in a “big black cloud of evil”, lives in a dark palace underground and his pet is his dragon Iceborn. The story is continued in The Duelling Dragons in which the children witness a rugby match taking place in the 1930s. As Merlin and Legend have fallen victim to Mordred and no longer know who they are, the three youngsters need to find something known as the ‘bread’ to cure Merlin’s and Legend’s memory loss. At one point, a brilliant ‘try’ results in the spectators bursting into song: “Cwm Rhondda” or “Bread of Heaven”, which breaks Mordred’s spell. However, Mordred is approaching on Iceborn, and the children now witness a battle between Scorch and Iceborn. This battle or thunderstorm overhead distracts the players of a present day match (there are frequent time switches in the middle of the plot lines) so that the Welsh team manages to score points to put them back in the lead. The following page is a mass of images where dragons and opposing players are fighting it out. The Welsh team fired on by Scorch wins. Merlin and Mordred’s fight is not at an end; here it is also a battle of time against memory, where Merlin sends Iceborn back into an embryonic form, thus eliminating him. Mordred is beaten for the time being. In The Dream Team Rhys’ dream is stolen by Merlin who then transports them to the ancient time and place of giants and druids. Mordred tells the stone giants he is their king and he orders them to help him destroy Welsh rugby and, more importantly, the realm of dreams through brute force. Merlin enlists the help of Brân and the giants of Annwn (the Welsh legendary underworld) from the Mabinogion. There are also the Adar Llwch Gwin, the Gwyllion of the Mountains and the Llamhigyn y Dwr, legendary beasts who come to the rescue. The greatest legend is of course Scorch. Merlin explains that if Mordred has unleashed a dream of destruction, then he, Merlin will replace it with something much better - Rhys’ dream. Thus, the final battle between all of the opponents takes place. Scorch destroys Mordred in a panel depicting something like a nuclear explosion and the final panel shows Scorch presiding over the 3 youngsters whom Brân declares to be the new rulers of Wales. The very last words are: “THIS LAND HAS NEW RULERS. “(DT. p 13). The ball has now been passed on to the younger generation. The narrative is to a large extent communicated through the images; thus, the dialogue is basic and limited to what is absolutely necessary and “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 231 which can’t be (or only with difficulty) conveyed through the illustrations. Words (all printed in capitals) often entail some kind of instruction, explanation, information or commentary; the latter intends to arouse the emotions of the characters in the comics as well as elicit a similar response from the readers; for example, Merlin, the tour guide dramatically and poetically claims: “..THE WELSH RUGBY TEAM ‘S DRESSING ROOM. YOU CAN FEEL THE PRIDE, SENSE THE RICH, PROUD HISTORY (next panel -) THIS IS WHERE WITH HEARTS A-POUNDING, AND MUSCLE, SWEAT AND SINEW STRAINING (next speech balloon -) THE PROUD FEW, THE PRIVILEGED FEW AWAIT THE CALL TO BATTLE.” (UtD. p 3 emphasis as in the original) Dialogue between the children is often very short or exclamatory, for example: “IT’S LOCKED.” (Megan) “GREAT, NOW WHAT? ” (Dylan) “MAYBE THERE’S ANOTHER WAY OUT. LET’S HAVE A LOOK ROUND.” (Rhys) “WHOA.” (Megan) (UtD. p 4) As the riddle of the dragon (see above) is displayed on a wall plaque, Megan repeats it, presumably with correct rhythm and rhyme, for the benefit of all. When they are transported into the medieval forest, Dylan explains what they have just experienced in case the reader is not sure: “IT WAS A BLINDING, SWIRLING VORTEX OF LIGHT” “WE’VE GONE BACK IN TIME.” (Megan) (UtD. p 6) Merlin, watching the rugby match keeps up a running commentary in the manner of a commentator: “NO! TAKE THE MAN NOT THE BALL! HOW MANY TIMES...” followed by ”YOU’RE HERE! ABOUT TIME TOO! COME ON, CROESAWU, COME IN, COME IN! ” (UtD. p 7) One notices the inclusion of Welsh language words: ‘croesawu’ meaning ‘welcome’. This increases as the series progresses, and obviously the national anthem is sung in Welsh. There is frequent recourse to ‘schoolboy’ humour and punning, such as: “I WISH WE HAD THE INTERNET”. (Megan) “GURGLE” (half speech balloon leading into the next) “WE CAN GURGLE IT” (Merlin) “GURGLE? ” (Dylan) Margret Holt 232 “MY CAULDRON. I CALL IT GURGLE. VERY USEFUL FOR ALL SORTS OF THINGS”. (Merlin) (UtD. p 11) or: “LEGEND HAS IT..” (Merlin) “LEGEND HAS WHAT? ” (Rhys) “THE MAP! LEGEND MY DOG. HE HAS THE MAP TO THE SWORD IN THE STONE” (UtD. p 9) This excerpt shows a complex twist on the expression ‘legend has it’. In fact, there is much playful and creative use of language; Merlin prefers the expressive and dramatic as in: “YES, BUT FIRES OF THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH SOUNDS MORE DRAMATIC THAN CORE: ” (UtD. p 15) Dylan is often more prosaic: “I WISH THAT THING CAME WITH SEATBELTS”. (UtD. p 16) Merlin likes to pose conundrums: “I CAN REMEMBER EVERYTHING THAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN LIKE IT WILL BE YESTERDAY” (DD. p 6) Another noticeable feature is the use (for obvious reasons) of “youth language” and influence from American English that is prevalent today. For example: “IT’S LIKE IT’S WATCHING ME”, “LOOK HERE GUYS”, “GOTCHA”, “GOTTEN”, “GOTTA” (! ), “COOL”, “AWESOME”, “MY MUM WOULD SO NOT APPROVE OF THIS”. In fact there are, from a Welsh or British point of view, a few cultural anomalies such as when rugby teams and the children sing the Welsh anthem with their hands on their hearts which would (despite other American customs such as coke and popcorn, baseball caps - now worn globally) appear NOT to have been adopted (yet) in the U.K. Other elements of youth culture can be seen in Dylan saying (from hip-hop): “NOW WE’RE COOKING! FIVE TONS OF FLYING FLAMETHROWER IN DA HOUSE” (DT. p 8). 6. Cultural and thematic references As the original intention of the comic series was to stir readers’ emotions and interest in aspects of Welsh culture and identity, the creators have very cleverly intertwined known and less well-known references to iconic moments in Welsh history relating to rugby (a defining feature of Welshness), Celtic legend and folklore, as well as Celtic literature to encourage investigation and exploration beyond the given. The stress on feeling pride in one’s own culture and one of being distinctly Welsh is of historical relevance when considering the centuries old conflict with England. The thematic threads are woven into this complex. Referring to the ‘well-known’ clearly iconic moments in rugby and in Welsh history and “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 233 widely known characters from Celtic and European fairy tale, myth and legend play vital roles. Pride in being Welsh extends to having a history that can be traced back into the mists of time, although this particular ‘history’ is reflected through and by the legends. To make the historical references come alive, the protagonists travel through time in order to experience, if briefly, medieval alchemy (Merlin’s laboratory) James James composing the tune to his father Evan James’ lyrics for the Welsh national anthem in 1856, 1930s Cardiff and specifically the Cardiff Arms Park Stadium. They witness a historic rugby match during (possibly identifiable as) the 1935-36 New Zealand tour when famous Welsh player Geoffrey Rees Jones with two successful tries beat the visiting New Zealand national team, the “All Blacks” 11 , and the crowd sing “Cwm Rhondda” (“Bread of Heaven”) to give fiery support to the Welsh team. Dylan remembers having to do a school project about the Great Depression back in the present. They travel down a mine for how important the Welsh coal mining industry was! It is shown that knowledge of one’s history connects the past to the present. Continuity and tradition enables one generation to pass something of themselves on to the next: the next generation here being the three heroes who have rescued the last dragon’s egg and helped to ‘unleash the dragon’ (symbolising pride and glory) of the present and the future. At the very end, the giant Brân (from the Mabinogion) takes off his crown as he is ‘no longer the king’ but now “THE LAND HAS NEW RULERS” (DT. p 13). The moral message is unmistakable: will, passion, courage and effort are rewarded with success - success not just for oneself, but for the community. The comics also cleverly fuse different elements of Welsh and Celtic folklore, legend and (European) fairy tale. Time travel enables them to encounter legendary figures and beasts, Merlin, Mordred, dragons, giants, and creatures such as the magical griffin-like Adar Llwch Gwin, (a metaphor for brave, strong men), the Gwyllion (female fairies who haunt the mountains), the Llamhigyn-y-Dwr (an amphibian water monster), and Coblynau (from the English ‘goblin’) 12 . Mention is made of (dark) druids and the creation of stone giants from the same Welsh bluestone as Stonehenge. Fairy tale elements come in as in Merlin’s cottage in the middle of the forest and in his offering the children “3 wishes” that are akin to those in “Rumpelstiltskin”. Regarding Welsh literature: the Arthurian influences or borrowings are the characters Merlin and Mordred and the sword in the stone that in this case needs specific (Welsh) music to release the sword and with it the dragon. From the Mabinogion there is the character of Brân, a giant leading a 11 www.wru.co.uk/ eng/ thewru/ history/ brief_history.php 12 See Vinycomb Margret Holt 234 race of giants who has a magic cauldron, which however in the Mabinogion is a restorer of life and the place of Annwyn, the other or underworld of Welsh mythology “where hopes and dreams are real”. The most important theme is the one of conflict between two rivals, which is being carried out on several levels in the real world, the mythical world and the dream world. The ongoing rugby matches form the background to the plot, whether in 1935 or 2013, and are referred to as a battle (sport thus also being in some way a sublimation of armed combat). This is reflected in various other conflicts: Scorch versus Iceborn (in DD), the red versus the white dragon representing the old political conflict between Wales and England; Merlin the trickster magician versus Mordred the traitor from Arthurian legend fighting over supremacy and control over time and memory. Merlin can juggle time, but Mordred controls memory and he tries to use that to obliterate people’s memories of the past, memories of the greatness of Welsh rugby, and therefore Welsh identity. If he were to succeed, he would be able to seize control, which is what he desires most. “I TRIED TO CRUSH THE WELSH SPIRIT BY DESTROYING WELSH RUGBY, BUT NOW I’M GOING TO TAKE A MORE DIRECT ROUTE! SMASH! CRUSH! DESTROY THE REALM OF DREAMS” (DT. p 39) Depriving his subjects of pride in their own history would deprive them of their identity and individuality. With loss of pride comes a loss of loyalty to one’s own cultural and ethnic group, the implication being that this would be undesirable. (Write ‘patriotism’ in capitals here! ) . Historically this is fitting considering the almost obliteration of Welsh culture and language up until relatively recently. It also fits in with a current phenomenon. This could be, in an age of so-called ‘globalisation’, an observed counteraction towards more ‘regionalism’ across Europe. Another important thematic thread throughout is the fantastical quality of the entire experience. The heroes’ existence constantly shifts between a real and a dream reality, present and past, and legend and history. The plot switches abruptly and speedily from one world to another as happens in films. A playful exploitation of dreaming as such is when Rhys is actually asleep, dreaming of playing in the Cardiff stadium and when Merlin steals this dream as it is more powerful than Mordred’s and thus will be able to defeat Mordred. “LOOK WHAT ONE OF THESE HUMANS CREATED” (Merlin to Brân) “HEY! THAT’S MINE” (next panel) “I THOUGHT THAT WAS JUST PART OF THE NIGHTMARE, BUT...YOU REALLY TOOK MY DREAM! ” (Rhys) “I’M SORRY. IT’S THE ONLY WAY WE CAN TRULY DEFEAT MORDRED” (Merlin) (DT. p 8) “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 235 Mordred is trying to crush the Welsh spirit by destroying Welsh rugby, and also destroy the realm of dreams. Rhys’ dream is one of a new power, and when it is launched against Mordred it actually succeeds in destroying him. He is virtually nuked out of existence as one of the last panels shows. Rhys declares that in fact everything is happening within his dream. It ends back in the Principality stadium. The message is that pursuing one’s dreams leads to victory and triumph in reality. There are a number of incidents of Intertextuality and Intermediality. There has already been mention of a possible Harry Potter connection with the trio; the mirror Mordred sees himself in is reminiscent of the “mirror of Erised” - the mirror of desire, but mirrors also feature in fairly tales. In Dawn of the Dragons, Mordred, with his back to the reader, is looking into the mirror that reflects the commentator looking out of maybe indicating two aspects of the same character: the evil desires within and the friendly facade without, but there are also indirect references to other works of fiction and film. As current generations may only have had contact with Merlin in the Disney version, further explanation is given: 3 panels explain that the real Merlin is not the Disney version of him: the real Merlin doesn’t like to appear in blue garments covered in stars, with a very long white beard and wizard’s hat: “THE MERLIN? ” (Rhys) “YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE MERLIN” (Dylan) “OH, YOU WERE EXPECTING SOMETHING MORE LIKE THIS [‘POOF’] “YEAH“(Dylan) “I DON’T LIKE STARS! THEY DO MY HEAD IN. THEY’RE SO TINY. BUT REALLY THEY’RE HUGE...” (Merlin, UtD. p 8) The way Mordred is drawn and in his demeanour he is reminiscent of ‘Lord Farquaad’ in the SHREK DreamWorks’ animation series, based on William Steig’s book Shrek. There are also likenesses to scenes from Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS (the ‘Balrog’ pursuing Gandalf and company in the mines of Moria, when Scorch flies across a fiery chasm; Saruman’s tower ‘Orthanc’ here depicted as being Mordred’s residence, protected by stone giants). There are stone giants in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Opposed to the stone giants (not the brightest creatures) in The Dream Team are the giants of Annwyn, commanded by Brân who is on familiar terms with Merlin. Brân is king of giants in the Mabinogion. Annwyn is the ‘other world’ of Welsh legend, where all dreams are possible. Margret Holt 236 7. The importance of Rugby in its connection to Welsh identity Since the comic series concerns Rugby and pride in being Welsh, the connection between them needs brief elaboration. Many scholars have investigated the complexities of Welsh identity (Welsh, British, English depending on the circumstances) identifying divisions among the population of Wales and identifications according to place (north, south, rural, urban), class and occupation, religion (not only non-conformist), language (Welsh/ English and bilingual), and politics (traditional party affiliations, devolution and beyond). However, rugby in particular has unified Welsh people in a remarkable way; amongst all the divisions it was the one thing they could and can agree on: “It (Welsh identity) found its most memorable human expression in what, after an initial struggle, had become its national game, rugby, the only field where it was possible to be simultaneously Welsh and a gentleman [...], where doctor and lawyer could ruck happily shoulder to shoulder with miner [...]where Wales could hope to express its now self-confident identity...” (Williams 1985: 221 13 ). It has always engendered enthusiasm, feelings of pride, patriotism, and thus can be seen as a symbol and a celebration of Welsh community and unity as well as a reproducer and indicator of national identity (cf Johnes 2008: 129-148; Andrews 1991: 335-349). The apparent obsession with rugby stems from its popularity and importance as a part of Welsh culture since the revivalist movement of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (which coincided with a “golden age” of rugby). Wales was intent on developing a separate identity and according to David Andrews: “it was Rugby that was to play a major part in the realisation of the aspiring Welsh nation. From being an emergent popular pastime the game was transformed into a high profile symbol of a vibrant, self-confident, national ideology” (Andrews 1991: 337). One way this was achieved was by connecting distinctive aspects of the period to a distant and acknowledged Celtic past, one that was seen by some to be ‘superior’ (ibid.: 339). This concurred with what other nations were doing in the 19 th century namely inventing themselves by connecting to achievements of their past; the nationally ambitious in Wales too, constructed a line of descent from the past that was intentionally different from that of the English: “Celtic athletic prowess became viewed by the populace as a major contributory factor in Welsh rugby’s success against those of Anglo-Saxon descent.” (ibid.: 340) The allure of beating the English in sport was strong: “To win at the game, especially against England is as important as gaining victory in the long war Wales began fighting for its independence centuries ago” (Evans 1985: 59). Rugby became “Welsh” despite having been first codified at Rugby School 13 In reference to the first “Golden Age” during the Edwardian period. “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 237 (England) in 1845, although older forms of the game had been played in many countries, including a medieval Celtic version called “cnapan”. As Andrews put it: “The Welsh history of the imagination had appropriated rugby and retroactively extended its Welsh heritage from the contemporary back through the Middle Ages and even into the realms of Celtic prehistory.” (Andrews 1991: 343) During the second “golden age” of the 1970s the sport rejoiced in having top achieving players who came from all classes, occupations and language backgrounds and therefore, ignoring all their differences they united as team players and thus represented their nation. The focal point of the game became the stadium in Cardiff (the “Cardiff Arms Park”) that could have been regarded as a place of pilgrimage as it included hymn singing in the intervals, thus raising the game almost to something quasi-religious. Through the media, the best players were celebrated as stars, acquiring a certain image of tough, strong masculinity - the pride of Welsh manhood so as to speak. What inspired the nation was the intimate connection between the sport and the public, spurred on by coaches who inspired players to “play for their nation”. Some players found this nationalism tedious, but they were proud nevertheless to don their teams’ colours. Some commentators criticised the overt patriotism, nevertheless, player Gerald Davies wrote: “rugby engages a nation in need of identity, from childhood onwards, it holds the imagination”(Davies 1983: 18). Gareth Edwards reminisced: “We were young kids who just adored what we were doing and revelled in the thrill of it” (Edwards 1999: 144), for example. Today, two things can be observed: first, rugby is no longer exclusively a male sport or interest; as society changes, many more women are now followers (as can be seen from social media platforms) and spectators at matches (also observable) as well as players (see Welsh Women’s Rugby Union) second, post comprehensivization of secondary schools rugby now plays a much less important role in school sport than it did in the days of the traditional grammar school, which must have an effect on subsequent numbers of players. Nevertheless, rugby still casts a mythical haze over Welsh history; the past aiding to keep the sport alive today. Aspects of sport that cannot be overlooked are the stirring of emotions of belonging, pride and excitement through the display of cultural markers: symbols and icons such as national colours, the Welsh flag, the red dragon, the wearing of daffodils and leeks, emblems and mascots (badges of membership) as well as the singing of iconic songs that strengthen feelings of identity, unity and community. Not only the terrace chants that cheer the players on, but also songs and the national anthem are acts of dedication and enjoyment that become magical and ceremonial (Klusen 1989: 85). To conclude, rugby, in particular, can be described as one of the most important factors in the creation of ‘Welshness’. It was the emergence of rugby as a Margret Holt 238 distinctly ‘Welsh’ sporting practice that contributed significantly to the formation of a ‘Welsh nation’. All of this is tapped into in the comics: what the reader notices is a kind of playful triumphalism of the Welsh over the English; there is a celebration of Welshness with the idea that Wales can be great at something, not only better than the English but also shine globally. Then there is the power of the mystery of the Celtic past linked to a palpable present in the inclusion of a strong female character and many other references to aspects of current culture. The inclusion of the female demonstrates that women have a part to play not only in rugby but in nation building and defending their nation. Negative aspects connected to today’s games have obviously been ignored, such as problems concerning alcoholism, hooliganism and so forth, but the comics are addressed to children who are hopefully being inspired, or shown at least that Welsh pride, resilience, courage and perseverance lead to worthwhile achievements. It is clear that this is an attempt by the WRU to rekindle the “fire” amongst the young, the message being that these can at least attempt to recreate the power of the game that has been seen to be in decline since the 60s and 70s, to herald a new “golden age” as the one of old where: “Wales ... produced sons strong of determination, invincible stamina, resolute, mentally keen, physically sound.” (South Wales Daily News 1905: n.p.g.) The comic series specifically focuses on the cultural markers referred to, as well as including factors connected to identity such as language (English, Welsh and a mixing of the two), place (Cardiff, Snowdon), and important historical, economic factors such as the mining industry, literature, legend and music already discussed above, all of which converge in the game of Rugby being played: a condensed manifestation of what it means to be Welsh. It describes a definite Welsh identity as being different from an English identity. Amusingly, this is depicted in the juxtaposition of Rugby and Croquet: a game that could be seen as the antithesis of rugby. Croquet gained tremendous popularity in England in the 19 th century. One of its features was that it could be played by men and women together, and seen as a more ‘feminine’ game it became synonymous with ‘gentility’ and sobriety. Two bystanders in Dawn of the Dragons (DotD) are jinxed by Mordred and lose their memory of rugby, then declaring: “YOU KNOW, I THINK I REALLY LIKE CROQUET”. When they regain their memory they are totally perplexed on finding themselves holding croquet mallets. They are drawn thin and weedy looking in complete contrast to the beefy rugby players on the facing page. The rugby players are drawn as the ‘epitome of maleness’, strong and handsome (like knights in shining white armour, fighting the just fight and defending their own power and territory). “Scorch” - a Welsh dragon, or Welsh identity “made simple”? 239 8. Evaluation and conclusion What needs to be considered is whether the comics achieve what they set out to do. The original aim of the instigators of the series, the Welsh Rugby Union, wished to rekindle an interest in the sport (watching and playing it) and to encourage youngsters to read, through discovering an interest in their past, their history, literature and legend, folklore and fantasy that connects them to the present. All this is also targeted at stirring feelings of patriotism and loyalty to Wales. The comics successfully make the link between the sport, pride in achievement and pride in what rugby represents (Wales). Additionally, the almost subliminal message is that enthusiasm and risktaking for a good cause has a positive outcome, which could be argued to be pedagogically sound. One could ask whether the comics can be read without knowledge of the context and culture and whether they are insubstantial without this knowledge. The encouragement to investigate the links to their own heritage is undoubtedly valuable, as much of what is referred to is likely to be new to the young readers, and is today not necessarily dealt with in school. Of course knowledge of one’s own history is important; everyone needs to know where they have come from and what has made them the way they are in order to understand themselves better. However, maybe the issues here have been over-simplified; too much use made of clichés; maybe there is too much stress on the patriotic. Maybe there is a danger in indulging in too much nostalgia, in dwelling too much on and glorifying a past “golden age” that never was as golden as it is portrayed. It would be very interesting to discover how young people (all those to whom the comics were sent in 2013, for example) actually responded, but for that an extensive survey would be necessary. Nevertheless, from an adult perspective at least, the comics are fun, full of action, colourful and exciting, even if not rich in detail, despite ‘hidden clues’ that invite question and investigation. They have been very cleverly designed, devised and produced, and if they achieve some of the aims then they are worthwhile in themselves. References Print: Andrews, David. 1999. Welsh indigenous! And British imperial? - Welsh rugby, culture, and society 1890-1914. Journal of Sport History 18 (3): 335-349. Ashe, Geoffrey. 1990. Mythology of the British Isles. London: Methuen. Davies, Gerald. 1983. Welsh Rugby Scrapbook. London: Souvenir Press. Edwards, Gareth. 1999. The Autobiography. London: Headline. Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac. FL: Poorhouse Press. Margret Holt 240 Evans, George Ewart. 1985. The Strength of the Hills. London: Faber and Faber. Hanlon, Tina L. 2003. The taming of the dragon in twentieth century picture books. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14 (1/ 53): 7-26. Klusen, Ernst. 1989. Singen, Materialien zu einer Theorie. Regensburg: Bosse. Jones, Gwyn & Thomas Jones. 1968 [1906]. The Mabinogion. London: Dent Everyman’s Library. Mason, Eugene. transl. 1962 [1912]. Arthurian Chronicles: Wace, Layamon (11 th .c & 12 th .c). London: Dent Everyman’s Library. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins & Kitchen Sink Press. Johnes, Martin. 2008. A prince, a king, and a referendum: rugby, politics, and nationhood in Wales, 1969-1979. Journal of British Studies 47 (1): 129-148. Simpson, Jacqueline. 1978. Fifty British dragon tales: an analysis. Folklore 89 (1): 79-93. Thomas, Gwyn & Kevin Crossley Holland. 1984. Tales from the Mabinogion. London: Victor Gollanz. Williams, Gwyn A. 1985. When Was Wales? London. Black Raven Press. [Reprint Penguin Books 1991] Digital: The Welsh Rugby Union: Scorch the comics. n.a. 22.8.2013 www.supporters.wru.co.uk/ scorch/ story.php. Accessed 12.1.16. Jones, G. Introduction to the project 22.8.2013 www.wru.co.uk/ eng/ news/ 27907.php#.Vq9o7eaLKSp. Accessed 12.1.16. N.a. “Back to school”. 6.11.2013 www.wru.co.uk/ scorch/ news/ 28769.php# VsLkhOaLKSo. Accessed 3.2.16. N.a.,n.d. History of rugby www.wru.co.uk/ eng/ thewru/ history/ brief_history.php. Accessed 15.2.16. The producers/ creators of Scorch: www.sunriseproductions.tv/ sports/ scorch/ © 2016. Accessed 25.2.16. Other features: See Scorch: www.youtube.com/ watch? v=NX4SRFSmolg. Uploaded 25.9.15. Accessed 3.2.16. Welsh rugby supporters (images): www.google.at/ search n.d. Accessed 3.2.16. Watch Ivor: www.youtube.com/ watch? v=G5ZMNyscPcg Episode 2, 3 rd series. Uploaded 21.8.06. Accessed 4.2.16. Other sources: Vinycomb, John. 1909. Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art. www.sacred-texts .com/ lcr/ fsca/ fsca21.htm. Uploaded 25.5.09. Accessed 15.2.16. For ‘strange creatures’ www.oxfordreference.com 2004. Accessed 15.2.16. On the Welsh dragon: www.walesonline.co.uk/ lifestyle/ nostalgia/ welsh-dragonmost-important-object-3012086? pageNumber=3 Uploaded 27.4.13. Accessed 15.2.16. A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. 2004. Online quick reference: http: / / www.oxfordreference.com/ view/ 10.1093/ oi/ authority.20110803095620632. Accessed 15.2.16. Heinz Tschachler “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations”: Racial and ethnic stereotyping in the writings of Washington Irving “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” Washington Irving’s reputation throughout has been for geniality and charm, with many friends and acquaintances professing to love him for his “bonhomie” (qtd. in Burstein 2007: 318, emphasis in original). As a writer, too, Irving has been characterized as all sweetness and light, a “gentle humorist” in Longfellow’s memorable words (1976: 39). Irving himself contributed much to this public image, writing, in the preface to Tales of a Traveller, that he was “for curing the world by gentle alternatives, not by violent doses; indeed, the patient should never be conscious that he is taking a dose” (CW- T, 4). Given these displays of moderation, it might come as a surprise that Irving was not beyond racist comments. For instance, on the occasion of elections held in his native New York City in 1807 he wrote in a letter, “a negro is an abomination unto me” (CW-L 1: 232). Such remarks are no exception in Irving’s writings, although publicly, his feeling toward African Americans was less outspoken and its articulations may be seen benevolently as typical of the ‘average’ racism of his time. By contrast, nearly all readers and critics have recognized Irving’s fairness and generosity toward Native Americans. As an example, they might have held up an 1814 essay, in which Irving offers to “speak in behalf of a race of beings, whose very existence has been pronounced detrimental to public security” (“Traits”, 145). The differences in the rhetoric become, if anything, more pronounced in Irving’s later writings. Here is one of the most striking examples, from a tour through the Oklahoma Territory in 1832. Observing a group of Osage Indians, Irving writes admiringly about their “Roman countenances” and “noble bronze figures” (CW-CM, 15). The stoic nobility Irving detects in the Osages contrasts starkly with the description, in a sketch based on his rough journals from the tour, of two African American men, the one “an old negro, as black as ebony, with a huge mouth, in a continual grin,” the other “a tall negro fellow, with a long good-humored face, and the profile of a horse” (CW-WR, 24, 26). Irving’s Indian rhetoric in Tour on the Prairies clearly follows the noble savage parable, if not the fetishization of Indians that goes by the name of the sublime, mining the sentimental drama in the Indians’ last stand. In contrast, Irving’s tendency to cast African Americans as Heinz Tschachler 242 somewhat subhuman faithfully repeats the traditional hierarchical scale of humans, in which blacks typically occupied the lowest link. Already the Bible indicated that Africans were the common descendants of Ham, the cursed son of Noah (Gen. 9: 18-29; Sanders 1969: 521-532). The myth was kept alive over time, receiving fresh fuel from the ‘theory of climate,’ which held that people from Southern regions were nonvaliant, idle, feeble - and mostly black. Everything was made much worse by slavery, which turned Africans into mere commodities and brutally dissolved whatever ethnic or national identities had existed among them. By the early nineteenth century, ‘Negroes’ in America had become a collective noun referring to an undifferentiated mass, distinct and inherently alien from all other people, and despised even by opponents to slavery. Throughout Irving’s writings, African Americans are loaded with all the myths and prejudices illustrating ‘Negroes’ as happy and jovial, lazy and trifling, superstitious, altogether ridiculous animals with very little intelligence. When referring to the indigenous population, however, Irving’s most common term for them is ‘savages,’ by which he simply means that American Indians do not hold the values of the Western world; nowhere does he so much as hint that they were inherently devoid or incapable of civilization. The difference in the rhetoric is not coincidental. Both the tendency to see blacks as a single indivisible and alien race of ‘Negroes’ and the carefully calibrated classification of America’s indigenous population have their roots in the age of Enlightenment. Whereas from the Renaissance travelers customarily recognized innumerable ‘nations’ in the non-European world, by the late eighteenth century ‘scientists’ had come to seriously consider the possibility - in analogy to the classification of plants and animals - of dividing humans into ‘varieties,’ ‘tribes,’ ‘species,’ or ‘races.’ As a result of the classification of human beings by means of taxonomy, terms like ‘race,’ ‘species,’ or ‘variety’ no longer were markers of perceived differences but designated immutable biological divisions resulting from the environment or created by God. ‘Nation,’ in contrast, came to stand for a cultural heritage of social customs and beliefs. And whereas ‘race’ and similar terms came to denote visible differences of physiology and, by extension, of the intellectual and moral make-up of different peoples and thus of their putative inferiority or superiority, ‘nation’ came to be identified with a coherent tradition of beliefs and customs, of government and laws. In the pages to follow I will explore how these adjustments of terminology - the changing meaning especially of the term ‘race,’ along with the associated terms ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ - suffused Washington Irving’s thinking, provided him with categories, and dictated his writings both on Native Americans and on African Americans. “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 243 “Roman Countenances” According to his biographer, Irving came by his interest in Native Americans “honestly, for it was shared by his brother William and his great friend Henry Brevoort, both of whom had Indian trading interests” (Wagenknecht 1962: 111). Trading interests had led to Irving’s first encounter with the indigenous population in the summer of 1803, during an excursion to upstate New York. The twenty-year-old does not appear to have been greatly impressed by the Natives he encountered, but not even the incident in which an Indian woman’s “much flattering attention” provokes her irate - and drunken - husband to calling him a “damned Yankee” and leveling him to the floor with a blow, turned him against the indigenous population. Instead, Irving seems to have fondly remembered another incident from the tour - a mock ceremony in which an honorary name was awarded to him - “Vomonte,” which, he was told, translated as “Good to Everybody” (Pierre M. Irving 1864, 1: 57, 58. Emphasis in original). The naming ceremony would be Irving’s last interaction with North American Indians for almost thirty years, yet in his published writings they make an appearance much earlier. In the satirical Salmagundi, the first number of which was published in January 1807, the “erudite” Linkum Fidelius applies his acumen also to the original settlers of America. About them he is said to have written “two folio volumes to prove that America was first of all peopled either by the antipodians, or the cornish miners, who he maintains, might easily have made a subterranean passage to this country, particularly the antipodians, who, he asserts, can get along under ground, as fast as moles” (CW-S, 208). By now, the reader has been warned. The “Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient (sic) City of Gotham,” from which this is taken, are but a burlesque of pedantry and a facetious display of antiquarian knowledge. Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York is, in a sense, a new version of Linkum’s “Chronicles.” The larger canvas of the book that made Irving a celebrity in 1809 also made it possible for him to launch a much fuller attack on all kinds of myths about the formation of the Union, especially those that rationalized the conquest of Indian lands. Thus he mocks the “heroic” efforts of the first white settlers, who rather than find the Eden they had been expecting were confronting a “howling wilderness” with “forests to cut down, underwood to grub up, marshes to drain, and savages to exterminate” (CW-H, 43, 35). Irving fills almost the entire first book with satirical attacks against the rapacity and false logic of white settlers. America, we are told, has been built solely on the unwarranted seizure of Indian land in a history of murder, theft, and fraud legitimized by legal authority. When the early colonists spoke of ‘reclaiming’ North America from the wilderness, they did not see their taking of the land as robbery. In Heinz Tschachler 244 1609, for instance, the preacher Robert Gray in a tract published in London to promote colonization in Virginia declared that “the greater part” of the earth was “possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild beasts […] or by brutish savages” (qtd. in Takaki 1992: 902). A Virginia pamphlet claimed that it was “not unlawful” for the English to possess “part” of the Indian land (ibid.: 903). Of course, the English soon wanted more than just a “part” of Indian territory, not least for the cultivation of tobacco as an export crop. Tobacco and, later, cotton stimulated not only territorial expansion but also immigration. About two centuries after the first English settlements the jurist James Kent argued that the entire American continent was “fitted and intended by Providence to be subdued and cultivated, and to become the residence of civilized nations” (1832, 3: 386). Kent’s treatise on Indian rights and titles was first published in the late 1820s, with a second edition following in 1832. Thus, his disquisition may be seen as a preview of the racialized views of ‘savagery’ that, after its first peak especially in seventeenth-century New England, again were coming into prominence as Manifest Destiny was taking hold (Vaughan 1982; Pearce 1988). When compared to Kent’s rationalizations, Irving’s views must be called truly progressive. The fairness and generosity that speak from them were reinforced by observations his close friend, Henry Brevoort, made on the western frontier in 1811. Brevoort’s observations, together with the views Irving himself articulated in A History of New York, reappear or are reflected in two American Indian sketches, first published in the Analectic Review in 1814 and later republished in The Sketch Book in 1820. Irving’s express purpose in both essays is to correct the image of the Indians, who he says had been wantonly dispossessed from the early years of colonization, and later grossly misrepresented through “vulgar prejudice and passionate exaggeration” (CW-SB, 227). Indeed, the gratuitous violence and dishonesty of the first settlers compares most unfavorably to King Philip, who is portrayed as one of a “band of native untaught heroes; who made the most generous struggle of which human nature is capable; fighting to the last gasp in the cause of their country, without a hope of victory or a thought of renown […] a patriot attached to his native soil” (ibid.: 235, 246). “Untaught” King Philip and his followers may have been, and thus seemingly lacking anything English settlers at the time identified as civilized - Christianity, agriculture, cities, letters, clothing, and sophisticated weaponry. Yet in calling Philip a “patriot,” Irving again challenges earlier testimonies in which Indians personified ‘savagery.’ These were racialized interpretations, an ideology built around the idea that savagery for the Indians was inherent. Hence they invariably were seen as “cruel, barbarous and most treacherous” (William Bradford), a “wild and savage people” living “like herds of deer in a forest” (Richard Johnson) or “run[ning] over “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 245 the grass” like the “foxes and wild beasts” (William Wood), and, worst of all, utterly unable “to make use of […] the Land,” without “any settled places, as Towns to dwell in, nor any ground as they challenge for their own possession” (Francis Higginson) (all qtd. in Takaki 1992: 898, 907). To all these accounts, Irving’s cultural relativism is in diametrical opposition. But there is more. By depicting King Philip as a “patriot,” Irving raises Indians to the level of the American revolutionaries who, as ‘patriots,’ had resisted and eventually separated from the English. Irving’s early respectfulness for America’s indigenous population and his sympathy for their plight is consistent with the testimony of other works, including The Life and Voyages of Columbus, first published in 1828. Columbus’s first impression of the Indians, Irving tells us, was of the natives’ sweetness and gentleness. “So loving, so tractable, so peaceable are these people,” Irving quotes from the seafarer’s journal. “They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy” (CW-C, 126). Irving wrote Columbus during a prolonged stay in Spain. When he finally returned to the United States after an absence of seventeen years, he was determined to write an American work, if only to get back to those critics who complained that he had been throwing away his talents on English and Spanish themes. Of course, Irving needed inspiration to write, and the best place to find such inspiration, he decided, was out on the prairies. Irving arrived in St. Louis in mid-September of 1832. Once there, he immediately called on William Clark - “The Governor,” as he was still called - who had explored the American West with Meriwether Lewis in 1803. Clark was now Superintendent of Indian Affairs and had been involved in the uprising led by the Sauk chief Black Hawk in protest of treaty violations. Militia butchered the protesters and Black Hawk surrendered to the authorities, a mere two weeks before Irving’s arrival. Irving was determined to visit the captive, only to find him, as he reported to his sister Catherine Paris, “an old man […] emaciated & enfeebled by the sufferings he has experienced and by a touch of cholera.” Irving had a hard time believing this was the man who allegedly had committed countless atrocities and professed that he also found it impossible “to get at the right story of these feuds between the White & the red man,” adding that “my sympathies go strongly with the latter” (CW-L 2: 723). Irving does not content himself with expressions of sympathy, but goes on to assess Black Hawk as an anthropological specimen. Listening to a doctor who was “given to craniology,” he interprets the Chief’s “aquiline nose” as an unmistakable signifier of the Indian’s “benevolence” (CW-J 5: 64; CW-L 2: 273). This was meant as living proof of the ‘noble savage’ parable, hence of Indian otherness. The classification is also evident from a letter to Heinz Tschachler 246 his brother Peter, in which Irving describes the prisoner as “a meager old man upwards of seventy [yet with] a fine head, a Roman style of face, and a prepossessing countenance” (CW-L 2: 734, emphasis added). Irving’s disposition continues once his group was on the way to the western border of the state of Missouri, angling toward Fort Gibson in what is now eastern Oklahoma. There he came to marvel at the Osages’ “Roman countenances” and “noble bronze figures” (CW-CM, 15, emphases added). The perceived nobility is not coincidental. For one thing, the Osages are noble (that is, in an aboriginal state) because they had not “yielded sufficiently, as yet, to the influence of civilization” (ibid.). Equally important is that the Osages constitute what Irving called “friendly Indians” (CW-L 2: 727) - that is, one of the tribes “with which the United States have Treaties.” 1 Significantly, it is only “friendly Indians” that Irving writes admiringly about, both in his journals and letters, and in print. In contrast, the very word “Pawnee” seems to have been enough to make Irving shudder, not at first sight, as he never saw any of them (CW-L 2: 731), but at a signifier that had proven useful in President Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy. Irving failed in the primary object of his tour - to see “the Pawnees, the Comanches, and other fierce and as yet independent tribes” that roamed the prairies in the western stretches of the territory (CW-CM, 9). This left him with the Osages, whom he describes as “the finest looking Indians I have ever seen in the West” (ibid.: 15). Their “noble bronze figures” distinguish them as the most aboriginal Indians, proof that America had its own wilderness, not just the equal of Europe’s but superior to it. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that an American wilderness is peopled with “figures of monumental bronze,” “model[s] for statuary” or “studies for a painter or a statuary” (CW-CM, 26, 20, 24). In Irving’s Indian rhetoric, individuals fade into representative males or females, arranged in rather static tableaus. This was the trademark of picturesque description, that is, of the “habit of viewing and criticizing nature as if it were an infinite series of more or less well composed subjects for painting” (Hussey 1967: 1). The picturesque is a function of an ideal form of nature, derived from landscape painting. The discovery of ideal scenes in existence had been Irving’s goal from early on. “I look chiefly with an eye to the picturesque,” he writes as early as 1805 while traveling in Europe (CW-J 1: 433). In Tour on the Prairies he applied the picturesque to the native population, writing, in a letter to his sister Catherine Paris, that he was “completely launched in savage life” (CW-L 2: 727). The “simple” camp life even prompted him to state his preference for American over European life: “I can conceive nothing more likely to set the youthful blood into a flow 1 Colonel Matthew Arbuckle’s instructions to Captain Jesse Bean, commander of a company of Rangers, as qtd. in WJ 32. “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 247 than a wild wood life of the kind and the range of a magnificent wilderness abounding with game and fruitful of adventure. We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe; it appears to me that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity and self-dependence most in unison with our political institutions” (CW-CM, 32). At first sight, the passage strikes one as an advertisement for the wilderness as national training grounds for the male body and mind, but Irving’s position was nonetheless contradictory. There is never a call to convert completely to the native experience. Rather, it is the land that is to be converted by preserving and appreciating the native heritage. Yet the transformation or, rather, reification of the indigenous population into “so many noble figures” becomes possible only as the West is won. By the 1830s, Indians had disappeared from the lives of most white Americans, except in the West and in the countryside. For the majority of white Americans, they were mere objects to be looked at, like specimens of natural history. The method, Laura Murray argues (1996: 221-226), transforms the indigenous population into passive victims, denying them history and positioning them in the realm of romance. Irving, Murray points out (ibid.), expressly laments the lack of historic record. “[T]hey have left scarcely any authentic traces on the page of history,” he writes in “Philip of Pokanoket,” yet for Irving this lack becomes an artistic opportunity. Stalking, like “gigantic shadows in the dim twilight of tradition,” Indians are worthy of “an age of poetry, and fit subjects for local story and romantic fiction” (CW-SB, 235). Irving thus seems to dismiss history altogether, replacing it with “the dim twilight of tradition,” all in generous admiration of Indian nobility (Reynolds 2004: 95). By the time Irving went on his tour, the Indian Removal Act had become law, Andrew Jackson’s removal policy was well under way, and the writer had a hard time seeing Native Americans in their closest approximation of an aboriginal state. Irving did not meet a great many Indians, though in his writings he honestly wrestles with the phonetic features of Indian names, some of which appear in altogether different spellings. And he marvels at first sights - at a “Group of Osages […] blankets - leather leggings & moccasins - hair cropped except bunch at top - Bust bare or wrapped in blanket.” On the same occasion, he observes some Creek Indians, one “with turban […] like an Arab [another] with scarlet turban and plume of black feathers like a cock tail, one with white turban & red feathers - Oriental look - like Sultans on the Stage. […] They look like fine birds of the Prairie” (CW-J 5: 103, 105). Clearly, the journals are more spontaneous than the literary version. For instance, an entry from October 12, 1832 - “figure of Indian - naked bust - blanket […] wild eyes” (CW-J 5: 109) - reappears in print as an “Osage on horseback issuing out of a skirt of wood […] about nineteen or twenty years of age […] with the fine Roman countenance common to his Heinz Tschachler 248 tribe […] his naked bust would have furnished a model for a statuary” (CW- CM, 20). Irving completed the manuscript in November 1834. In March 1835, Tour on the Prairies debuted in London; the American edition was published a month later, on April 11. It was Irving’s long-awaited American book, and to many American readers, the wait was worth it. “Irving among the … Osages of the frontier! ” bubbled an effusive reviewer (Aderman 1990: 105). By November, Irving’s “sentimental journey,” his “romantic excursion” had sold more than 8,000 copies, and sales in England were just as encouraging (ibid.: 103, 207). It is entirely fitting to see the Tour as a literary effort, the product, not of a practitioner of natural history so much as of a writer who was still one of these “lovers of the picturesque,” as Irving had described himself in the first section of the Sketch Book (CW-SB, 9). The picturesque imagination in the worst sense glorifies the other side. Irving frequently has been reproached for uncritically praising the “courage, fortitude, and perseverance” of the early fur traders and trappers, while at the same time completely (or, rather, almost completely) avoiding pro- Indian passages in his books about the Northwest, Astoria and Bonneville (Burstein 2007: 282-289). Did Irving not know that the broad foundation of his friend John Jacob Astor rested on suffering and debauchery? Did he really so calmly take for granted that eventually the fur-bearing animals were going to be exterminated in a cruel sacrifice to the Almighty Dollar? Yet it will not do to make Irving blinder than he was. The fur traders and “the grand enterprizes of the great fur companies” may have fired his imagination as a youth. In the process of telling the story, however, he describes how the European adventurers’ “conduct and example gradually corrupted the natives” (CW-A, 3, 7), and he continues to denounce white atrocities against Native Americans, with the whites, not the Indians, as the aggressors. “We kill white men,” Irving quotes one of the tribal chiefs, “because white men kill us” (ibid.: 130). Similarly, in Bonneville, the Blackfeet are said to cherish a “lurking hostility to the whites” ever since one of their tribe had been killed by Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition. By way of contrast, Irving records Bonneville’s opinion that the Nez Percés, in spite of the unfavorable reports of others, are “one of the purest-hearted people on the face of the earth” (CW-B 36: 181). The theme of Indian dispossession, together with a sense of loss and regret continues in a number of minor writings from Irving’s later career. For instance, in an 1839 essay titled “National Nomenclature” Irving suggests restoring indigenous names to locations “of sublimity and beauty.” New York, he wrote, should become the “City of Manhattan” and the United States of America the “United States of Alleghenia” or “Appalachia” (CW-M 2: 115-119). In “Wolfert’s Roost,” likewise published in 1839, Irving traces the Indian legends surrounding Wolfert’s Roost in New York and tells “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 249 how the Roost and all its domains came into possession of the Dutch (CW- WR, 3-16). In “The Seminoles,” published a year later, Irving tells a similar story of the “invasions and encroachments of white men,” in this instance from the time of the early Spanish explorers to the time of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek of 1823 (ibid.: 182). It is significant that Irving’s last work on Native Americans is a sympathetic account of Indian resistance to white encroachment and to the government’s removal policy, for it contradicts claims by scholars that Irving softened his pro-Indian views and embraced Manifest Destiny with all its dire consequences for the Indians. It may be regretted that Irving did not openly condemn those facts of national life, but as Daniel Littlefield succinctly put it, “to stand against American expansion would have been like standing against a tidal wave” (1979: 151). The broader picture Irving’s attitude toward the West was ambiguous at best, yet he does not fail to open up to the indigenous population. He has a genuine interest in the customs and beliefs of different nations and tribes, and he consistently does his best not to perceive Indians through a veil of prejudices. This estimation should be seen as a compliment, and more than one critic has recognized Irving’s responsibility in his ethnological descriptions. In this context, it is altogether puzzling that Irving likely never read Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which was first published in 1785 and never out of print during his lifetime. Especially Query VI was widely known for its passionate rebuff of the Comte de Buffon’s famous thesis that in the Americas nature - that is, plants, animals, and humans - was in a much inferior state when compared to Europe. “Nature, by refusing [the North American Indian] the power of love,” Buffon had written, has “lowered him worse than any animal.” To this, an incensed Jefferson responded, “The Indian of North America is neither more defective in ardor, nor more impotent with his female […] is brave […] will defend himself against an host of enemies […] endures tortures with a firmness unknown […] with us […] his vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours [In summary, therefore, the Indians of North America] are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the ‘Homo sapiens Europaeus.’” 2 Irving may have despised Jefferson and he may have disregarded the only book the Virginian ever wrote. He was, however, familiar with Buffon. But in contrast to Jefferson, who passionately engages Buffon in a debate, 2 Jefferson (1982: 59-60, 62). Buffon later admitted his “error,” explaining that by “degeneracy” he had meant immaturity. On Buffon’s view of the Americas, see Wilson (2004: 113-117). For discussion of the Buffon-Jefferson controversy, see Wallace (1999: 76-79). Heinz Tschachler 250 Irving merely lampoons the famous naturalist. In The History of New York, for instance, the “great Buffon” appears at the end of a long list of “ancient and outlandish philosophers” for his “startling conjecture […] so highly honorable to mankind, that the whole human species is accidentally descended from a remarkable family of monkeys! ” (CW-H, 28, 38) Irving’s words on what appears to be an early form of the theory of evolution may sound embarrassing to modern ears, not merely because evolution has become widely accepted, at least among serious scientists. For Irving and other antidemocratic satirists, such ideas spelt nothing but chaos and license, an end to the traditional order of things (Roth 1976: 67-78). And in lampooning the idea that all humans, blacks included, are derived from a single origin, Irving unwittingly taps into the controversy, so acute from the mid-nineteenth century, between proponents of Adamitic or single-origin theories and those of polygenesis or multiple creations, one for each ‘race’ or human ‘species’ (Gossett 1997: 58-60). Polygenesis, once it had rid itself of religious orthodoxy, was to add fresh fuel from ‘science’ to the argument that claimed blacks to be a different species, representing the lowest grade of all human species. At this point it is worth remembering that in Buffon’s view Africans were more various than American Indians. The view at the time was widespread in Europe and it was quite consistent with what early explorers wrote home about (Hudson 1996: 251-252 and 260n12). In America, however, only very generalized descriptions of Africans circulated, and ideas about the temperament or capacities of ‘Negroes’ were based almost exclusively on what was observed of slaves. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, suspects that, when viewed “as subjects of natural history,” blacks are inferior to whites by nature, that is, “in the endowments both of body and mind” (1982: 143). As for ‘evidence,’ Jefferson writes, “But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” (ibid.: 140). He feels “compelled,” therefore, to enroll blacks “at the bottom of the column” (ibid.: 141). In Buffon’s model, the “Asiatic, the European, Negro, [and] the American […] belong to the same family.” They constitute, not separate species or races, but varieties of the same. Even though white is the “natural color of man,” the “marks which distinguish men who inhabit different regions of the earth, are not original, but purely superficial” (2011: 185, 184). Put differently, ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’ may become ‘civilized,’ transformed from tribes to nations. Theoretically, the model might be extended to blacks and consequently was used by abolitionists who, following eighteenthcentury science, also stressed the notion of a universal human nature. More often than not, however, blacks found themselves caught up by the idea of a fixity of the species along a graded scale. The idea originated with Carl “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 251 Linnaeus, who from the 1730s classified nature on the basis of physical characteristics, hence of ‘natural’ differences between species. Within the rhetorical paradigm of “natural history” (Regis 1992: 153) - originally developed to classify plants and animals, but soon to be complemented by a “department of man” - two radically different trajectories for describing non-Europeans emerged. For blacks, race became destiny. North American Indians, in contrast, came to be classified as Nordic. This was a considerable leap forward from earlier accounts of them as inherently “savage,” “cruel, barbarous and most treacherous,” a “vile race,” in Shakespeare’s words, of “born devils” (qtd. in Takaki 1992: 897, 904). Especially in representations prior to, say, the 1750s, Indian ‘savagery’ had been racialized, seen as something inherent. To construct ‘savagery’ as cultural was a different story, one predicated on nurture rather than on nature. Indeed, once Indians were no longer represented through inborn group traits that rendered them naturally incapable or devoid of civilization, they were equal to Europeans at least in principle, even though in the context of Manifest Destiny they once again ended up as Others, static, like wild flowers and animals, outside of history, and without individuality (Vaughan 1982: 917-953). Blacks had traditionally occupied the lowest link in the hierarchical scale of humans. By means of taxonomy, however, blacks were perceived as a distinct biological category. With their distinctive physical characteristics such as skin color indelibly attached to their putative intellectual and moral inferiority, blacks in every sense of the word became racial “Others” (Jordan 1968: 28-30, 187-191). Moreover, ‘natural’ differences based on imagined racial characteristics provided the kind of thinking that slavery had begun to depend on from the eighteenth century. Negro slavery in America, Thomas Gossett explains (1997: 29), began when “twenty Negars” landed at Jamestown in 1619, though it then was one form of servitude among other forms and did not become an important source of labor until the end of the seventeenth century when English labor became scarce. Only then did it become important for generating race theories, both in Europe and in America. America was exceptional, however, in that the Revolution made slavery even more of a problem. When that revolution was underway, one fifth of the American population was enslaved, which, in numbers, was about 500,000 men, women, and children from a total of two and a half million. Although most slaves lived in the Southern colonies, slavery was also present in the North. Fourteen percent of New York’s population was enslaved, eight percent of New Jersey’s, and six percent of Rhode Island’s. Slaves were regarded as little more than animals, chattel. Slaveholders bought them at markets and kept them as if they were livestock. That the majority of Americans took slavery for granted was made easier by the Heinz Tschachler 252 ubiquity of servitude everywhere, which included whites as well, and the similarities in treatment of slaves and servants. “Abominations” Representations of North American Indians as well as of Africans clearly show that at least in western cultures the marking of difference is central. For the British cultural studies analyst Kathryn Woodward, for instance, the marking of difference is the very basis of culture, the means by which to make sense of the world and to construct meanings. This is done by assigning to people and things “different positions within a classification system” (1997: 29, emphasis in original). So far so good. But classification systems are powerful tools that are far from neutral. They apply a “principle of difference […] in such a way as to be able to divide [individuals as well as groups of people] and all their characteristics into at least two, opposing groups - us/ them” (ibid.: 1-2). For instance, by demonizing the Indians the early English settlers were able to define more precisely what they perceived as the ultimate horror in their errand into the American wilderness - to “degenerate” into “Indian vices,” in Cotton Mather’s words of 1698 (1820 2: 344). By the same token, the question whether Africans in their character, disposition, or mental abilities were equal to Europeans was widely discussed also in America, and almost always in connection with the legitimacy of slavery. It was the “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty,” Jefferson noted, that forms “a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people” (1982: 143). Therefore, their supposed “inferiority” could not possibly be “the effect merely of their condition of life,” that is, of the legal and therefore unnatural forces that had enslaved them, but must also be rooted in “nature” (ibid.: 141). It is a truism to say that social context mediates one’s idea of the Other. Americans who saw black people almost exclusively in the uprooted and dehumanized condition of slavery invariably referred to them as ‘Negroes’ - an indistinguishable mass forming a single, separate, and alien race, or, in Washington Irving’s view, an “abomination” (CW-L 1: 227). In fairness, Irving condemned slavery and he frequently took a jab at the southern mentality, but he appears to have had neither love nor respect, let alone applause for African Americans (Wagenknecht 1962: 110; Reed 1970: 43-44). As Wayne Kime astutely remarked, Irving “could denounce the dehumanizing system of slavery while [his] practice relating to Negroes” was, at best, “equivocal,” manifesting itself in “a strong strain of condescending views toward Negroes” as well as in “what now seem breathtaking gaucheries” (1977: 17, emphasis in original). “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 253 Black people were a familiar sight to Washington Irving from early on. Irving grew up in New York City, which in 1807 had some 9,000 blacks, out of a population of approximately 60,000 (Burstein 2007: 5-6; 68; 92). At the time, New York already was a vibrant city, rowdy and disorderly especially at election times. With many restrictions on voting lifted, a sizable number of blacks had been added to the electorate. Yet inexperienced and illiterate as many of them were, they were hardly in a position to resist being corralled and compelled to vote either for the Democratic Republicans or, as in the instance recorded by Irving, for the Federalists. Irving, who was engaged as an election aide, was shocked by their treatment. “I almost pitied them,” he wrote, again to Mary Fairlie, “for we had them up in an enormous drove in the middle of the day waiting round the poll for a chance to vote. the (sic) Sun came out intolerably warm […] and being packed together like sheep in a pen, they absolutely fermented, and a cloud of vapour arose like frank incense to the skies” (CW-L 1: 232). Irving’s remarks, it should be stressed, are from a private letter, yet even publicly Irving did not hesitate to refer stereotypically to African Americans’ habits, casting blacks as humble in intelligence and devoid of taste - and thus faithfully propagating the accustomed myth of Africans as happy, lazy, superstitious, altogether ridiculous animals. As early as 1807, African Americans appear in one of their conventional roles, as domestics. In a sketch of the Cockloft family, published in Salmagundi, Irving writes: “We have a little, old, crusty, grey-headed negro, who has lived through two or three generations of the Cocklofts, and of course has become a personage of no little importance in the household. He calls all the family by their Christian names; tells long stories about how he handled them on his knee when they were children; and is a complete Cockloft chronicle for the last seventy years” (CW-S, 132). In A History of New York, blacks likewise are depicted as domestics. A typical Dutch household, for instance, includes “some old crone of a negro, who was the oracle of the family, - and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon, a string of incredible stories about New England witches - grisly ghosts - horses without heads - and hairbreadth escapes and bloody encounters among the Indians” (CW-H, 104). As to superstition, in “The Haunted House,” a story collected in Bracebridge Hall (1822), Irving again has an African American - described as a “gray-headed curmudgeon of a negro” - telling “fearful stories, accompanied by such awful rollings of his white eyes” (CW-BH, 249, 250). In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” too, a somewhat ridiculous specimen appears on stage “mounted on the back of a ragged, wild, halfbroken colt,” to deliver an invitation to a “quilting frolic” to the story’s protagonist, Ichabod Crane. Then having delivered his message, the man is Heinz Tschachler 254 seen “scampering away […] full of the importance and hurry of his mission” (CW-SB, 284). Still, Irving condemned slavery and so it is no surprise that in Tales of a Traveller (1824) he has Tom Walker, when bargaining with the devil, “resolutely” refuse to turn slave dealer, not for all the gold in the world or, for that matter, for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure (CW-T, 223). Yet in the same section, Irving pointedly emphasizes the ‘natural’ indolence of African Americans when we encounter “Mud Sam, the Black Fisherman” - the eponymous protagonist of the rambling story - “indulging in a true negro’s luxury - sleeping in the sunshine” (ibid.: 251). Again in the somewhat gothic story, the protagonist is represented in one instance with “his white eyes strained half out of their orbits” and in another instance with his “old negro’s bald head thrust in at the door, his white goggle eyes contrasting with his jetty poll, which was wet with rain and shone like a bottle” (ibid.: 245, 247). We can safely say that by the 1820s Irving had come to embrace wholeheartedly the notion that blacks are by nature ridiculous and superstitious. His western writings are no exception in this regard. Traveling through Kentucky in the early days of September 1832, Irving knew that he was in the slave-owning South. Thus, he jotted in his journal in the language of the day: “Old negro Stewart very black with bright madrass handkerchief on head - large feet, gold ear rings - Shirt collar up to his ears […] white jacket and trousers […] apron to his armpits”; “barefoot negro […] fat Negro wenches drying apples & peaches on board”; “chorus of Negro boat men”; and “Old negro steward scolding young negroes for lying” (CW-J 5: 42-48). There is, in fairness, also another Irving in the western journals. En route to the prairies, he struck up a conversation with a slave woman, and asked her about her children. “As the tears started in her eyes,” he recorded in his journal on September 8, 1832, “she got up [and] crossed the hut - I’m not allowed to live with them - they are up at the plantation” (CW-J 5: 48). Irving also faithfully records one slave owner telling him “he never struck a negro since he was a boy. would (sic) not Sell one unless the negro wished to go away” (ibid.: 55). Such wrenching true stories only added fuel to Irving’s sympathy with the oppressed, yet abolitionism was too hot a topic for him. His “opinions,” a biographer notes, “remained his own” (Jones 2008: 301). Thus, Irving remained silent when James Kirke Paulding, one of his closest friends, in 1835 published Slavery in the United States, an embarrassing rationalization of Negro slavery as part of the natural order of things (Burstein 2007: 284). He later remained just as silent about Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Williams 1935: 393). The silence may show Irving’s ambivalence towards the ‘peculiar institution,’ as slavery was euphemistically called, but in 1851 he made a particularly crude comment, writing to his friend John P. Kennedy that he “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 255 wished to heavens “nature would restore to the poor negroes their tails and settle them in their proper place in the scale of creation. It would be a great relief to both them and the abolitionists, and I see no other way of settling the question effectually” (CW-L 4: 248, emphasis added). This is all but topped by a remark Irving made in conversation in 1859 and, worse, by the hilarity over his own gaucherie about blacks: “I shouldn’t mind about the ‘Niggers’ if they had only brought them over before they had drilled off their tails” (qtd. in Kime 1977: 214). Embarrassing as Irving’s words may sound to modern ears, they pale when compared to the repulsive comments that many other northern writers or proponents of the ‘scientific’ racism with all its pseudo-biological trappings made, and made publicly. Irving, for his part, kept his opinions to himself, burying his condescending views of blacks in private letters and in conversation, much as he never tired of denouncing negro slavery as a dehumanizing system. Still, he did see blacks as a somewhat lower animal form, and he certainly left out no antebellum stereotype. But if Irving was never as sensitive as the modern mind demands, there is almost no exposé from this quarter, and what there is hardly provides a convincing answer to the question how, given the ‘average’ racism of a time when “the half” had not yet been told, Irving could have recognized and reacted decisively. 3 I have no patience with attempts to undermine Irving’s reputation, though I feel compelled to point out that Irving’s public image of sweetness and delight has been formed largely by a biography written by his nephew Pierre M. Irving. Published in 1862, this hagiographic piece of writing, for the longest time the most valuable source, exclusively conveys the uncle’s kinder, gentler side. This is blatantly obvious from Pierre’s treatment of the letter to Mary Fairlie, which simply substitutes three asterisks - “***” (1: 187) - for “a negro is an abomination […] unto to me” plus some ten more lines (CW-L 1: 232). It is easy to understand why the nephew took the position he did when he did it. But to quietly omit “a negro is an abomination […] unto me” elides a premier pictorial criterion for the naturally inferior and barbarian. The nephew’s omission has become known thanks to the scholarship that has gone into the critical edition of Irving’s letters. Yet as Daniel Burstein wryly remarks, what “other less appealing traits have been buried we will never know” (2007: 329). 3 Reference to “the half” is to Edward Baptist (2014). Telling of that “half,” Thomas Gossett reminds us (1997: 411-425), began in Europe, with John Stuart Mill, Theodor Waitz, and Franz Boas spearheading the revolt against racist ideologies. For discussion of Irving’s alleged “racism,” see Wagenknecht (1962: 110), Kime (1977: 169-170; 326), Burstein (2007: 327-329), as well as Kenneth Reed’s scathing essay (1970: 43-44). Heinz Tschachler 256 Epilogue Still the nagging question remains: Where did Irving’s “less appealing traits” originate from? Let’s take a look at his political views. For the younger Irving, a Federalist’s anti-democratic bias was enough to see all tendencies towards greater equality as tradition’s Armageddon, an end to order and civilization. Hence his sneers at newly enfranchised constituencies in terms of “small beer or tobacco” and an altogether “nauseous piece of business,” “abomination” included (CW-L 1: 232). Politics also got in the way of Irving’s thinking as he got older and turned himself into a staunch nationalist. As Pierre M. Irving wrote in the midst of the Civil War, his uncle always had been “[e]minently national in his feelings, a lover of his whole country” (1864: 4: 299). Thus upon his second return from Europe in 1846 Irving was watching the impending crisis in his country with attentive anxiety. Unsurprisingly, he conceived of his final published work as an indirect plea to preserve a political system that, as he wrote in the conclusion to the Life of George Washington, had fostered “purer civil liberty […] than [had] hitherto been the portion of mankind” (CW-GW 5: 475). Yet even as he wrote these sounding phrases - Irving is quoting a statement by America’s first president - he must have perceived their glaring irony. How could he talk of “civil liberty” in the United States when half the nation practiced Negro slavery, an institution he denounced in private as “accursed” (qtd. in Kime 1977: 209), and when racism (the word did not then exist, coming into the English language only in 1903) was rampant? Washington Irving, Wayne Kime astutely remarks, “could not reconcile his plea for national unity with his belief that slavery was a blot on the national conscience which must be removed at any cost. Like many Americans, North and South, he was committed to two mutually exclusive positions” (1977: 169-170). Nor was Irving ever able to reconcile his reformist attitude toward Negro slavery and his condescending views of blacks. He could be moved to tears of sentimental benevolence by the “negro anecdotes” in the Reverend W. H. Milburn’s Ten Years of Preacher Life (1859), yet he relished recounting anecdotes of various amusing “darkies” he had encountered (Kime 1977: 170). In the disjuncture between his reformist attitude toward Negro slavery and a strong strain of condescension towards blacks, Irving was once again thoroughly a man of his time. His attitude towards Indians, too, placed him squarely among his contemporaries, even though Indians were never part of Irving’s life as a white American. This distance made it easier for him to speak up, from his early writings, against the disregard of and contempt for Native Americans. Conversely, Irving’s “eminently national” feelings for a country “full of youthful promise” clearly stood in the way of speaking up more boldly and decisively against westward expansion and its dire consequences upon the cultural heritage of “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 257 the indigenous population. 4 Especially in his western writings, Irving settled for a largely aesthetic view, rendering Indians as noble savages, whose “Roman countenances” he asked his readers to admire. Thus when all is said and done, attempts to downgrade Irving for his alleged “unwilling[ness] to show concern over the slavery issue” as well as for contributing to “the propagation of certain myths about blacks” (Reed 1970: 43) conceal rather than reveal. So do the labels “romantic enthusiasm for primitive tribes,” “sentimentalism,” and “picturesque native” when applied to Irving’s representations of Native Americans (Keiser 1933: 62, 64). Irving was, after all, living in history, the product of his time and circumstances. Accordingly, it was deemed more fruitful to examine the grounds of his knowledge and its discourses, looking at as well as through his writings. To do so revealed that when Irving represented Native Americans as ‘savages,’ he did so, not on the basis of putatively inherent traits but because he saw their culture as different. In contrast, African Americans for Irving were an “abomination” precisely because he saw their difference as the result of nature. In all of this, his rhetoric was not much different from the language of the day and, moreover, already a product of the racial and ethnic classifications developed and propagated by Enlightenment thinkers. While Irving’s rhetoric was no longer authorized by the divinely timeless order implied by Natural History, it was nonetheless circumscribed by this method, which suggested that the Other - Native Americans and African Americans alike - was a different species. Abbreviations CW-A - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize beyond the Rocky Mountains. Ed. Richard Dilworth Rust. Boston: Twayne, 1976. CW-B - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. Ed. Robert A. Rees and Alan Sandy. Boston: Twayne, 1977. CW-BH - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall or The Humourists. A Medley by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Herbert F. Smith. Boston: Twayne, 1977. CW-C - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: The Life and Voyages of Columbus. Ed. John Harmon McElroy. Boston: Twayne, 1981. CW-CM - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Crayon Miscellany. Ed. Dahlia Kirby Terrell. Boston: Twayne, 1979. CW-GW - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Life of George Washington. Ed. Allen Guttmann and James A. Sappenfield. 3 vols. Boston: Twayne, 1982. 4 Irving, “eminently national,” Pierre M. Irving (1864, 4: 299); “full of youthful promise,” (CW-SB, 234). Heinz Tschachler 258 CW-H - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: A History of New York. Ed. Michael L. Black and Nancy B. Black. Boston: Twayne, 1984. CW-J - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Journals and Notebooks. Ed. Nathalia Wright et al. 5 vols. Madison and Boston: University of Wisconsin Press and Twayne Publishers, 1969-1981. CW-L - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Letters. Ed. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks. 4 vols. Boston: Twayne, 1978-1982. CW-M - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. Wayne R. Kime. 2 vols. Boston: Twayne, 1981. CW-S - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. / Salmagundi; or The Whimwhams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others. Ed. Bruce I. Granger and Martha Hartzog. Boston: Twayne, 1977. CW-SB - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Haskell Springer. Boston: Twayne, 1978. CW-T - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Tales of a Traveller by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Judith Giblin Haig. Boston: Twayne, 1987. CW-WR - The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Wolfert’s Roost. Ed. Roberta Rosenberg. Boston: Twayne, 1979. “Philip” - Irving, Washington. “Philip of Pokanoket.” Analectic Review 3 (June, 1814): 502-515. “Traits”- Irving, Washington. “Traits of Indian Character.” Analectic Review 3 (February, 1814): 145-156. WJ - The Western Journals of Washington Irving. Ed. John Francis McDermott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Works Cited Aderman, Ralph M. 1990. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G.K. Hall. Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Buffon, George Louis Lecler, Comte de. 2011. [1965]. Natural history, general and particular. In James Sydney Slotkin (ed.), Readings in Early Anthropology, (repr.), 184-185. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books. Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. [1963]. Race: The History of an Idea in America. (repr.). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Hudson, Nicholas. 1996. From ‘nation’ to ‘race’: The origin of racial classification in eighteenth-century thought. Eighteenth-Century Studies 29: 247-264. Hussey, Christopher. 1967. [1927]. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. (repr.) Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Irving, Pierre M. 1862-1864. The Life and Letters of Washington Irving. 4 vols. New York: Putnam. Jefferson, Thomas. 1982. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. New York- London: W. W. Norton. Jones, Brian Jay. 2008. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade Publishing. “Roman Countenances” and “Abominations” 259 Jordan, Winthrop D. 1968. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550- 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Keiser, Albert. 1933. The Indian in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Kent, James. 1832. Commentaries on American Law. 4 vols. 1826-1830; 2 nd edn. New York: O. Halsted. Kime, Wayne R. 1977. Pierre Munro Irving and Washington Irving: A Collaboration in Life and Letters. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. 1979. Washington Irving and the American Indian. American Indian Quarterly 5 (2): 135-154. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1976. In the Churchyard at Tarrytown [1876]. In Andrew B. Myers (ed.), A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Restorations. 38-39. Mather, Cotton. 1820. [1698]. Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England. 2 vols. Boston: Silas Andrus. Murray, Laura J. 1996. The aesthetic of dispossession: Washington Irving and ideologies of (de)colonization in the early republic.” American Literary History 8: 205-231. Pearce, Roy Harvey. 1988. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Kenneth T. 1970. Washington Irving and the Negro. Negro American Literature Forum 4 (2): 43-44. Regis, Pamela. 1992. Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Reynolds, Guy. 2004. The winning of the west: Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies. Yearbook of English Studies 34: 88-99. Roth, Martin. 1976. Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving. Port Washington, NY & London: Kennikat Press. Sanders, Edith. 1969. The Hamitic hypothesis: its origin and functions in time perspective. Journal of African History 10 (4): 521-532. Takaki, Ronald. 1992. The Tempest in the wilderness: the racialization of savagery. Journal of American History 79 (3): 892-912. Vaughan, Alden T. 1982. From white man to redskin: changing Anglo-American perceptions of the American Indian. American Historical Review 87: 917-953. Wagenknecht, Edward C. 1962. Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1999. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Williams, Stanley Thomas. 1935. The Life of Washington Irving. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Douglas L. 2004. The evolution of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112 (2): 98-133. Woodward, Kathryn (ed.). 1997. Identity and Difference. London: Sage. Nursen Gömceli Language and physicality in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996): A postdramatic analysis Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs Abstract Enda Walsh, whose plays have been staged in many different parts of the world and translated into numerous languages, has established himself today as one of the most outstanding voices of contemporary Irish theatre with remarkable international recognition. Having made a name outside Ireland first with Disco Pigs, which he had written for the Cork-based Irish theatre company Corcadorca, Enda Walsh is today widely known for the “high-energy physicality” and “strange, made-up language” (Gardner) in his playwriting, which he had engraved into the minds of his audiences already with Disco Pigs. The aim of this paper will be to examine these two aspects of the play along with its staging methods, which not only form some of the basic constituents of Enda Walsh’s theatre but also display his postdramatic approach to theatre. 1. Introduction Disco Pigs, a one-act two-hander set in Cork, depicts the two days in the lives of two teenagers, Pig and Runt, as two close friends who have inseparably been together since their birth on the same day and in the same hospital in Cork, and are preparing to celebrate their 17 th birthday in ‘Pork Sity’. While portraying the intense love story between the two teenagers, the play also shows how the two teenagers survive in their self-created world through their own means and in seclusion from their families and their social environment. Having been given more than fifty productions worldwide, translated into diverse languages like German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and made into a film in 2001, Disco Pigs is Enda Walsh’s first international success which has brought him numerous prestigious awards soon after its first international production at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in 1997: starting with the Scotland on Sunday’s Critics’ Award, in the same year, Walsh was presented the Observer Play of the Year Award, the Best of Fringe Award at the Dublin Theatre Festival, the George Devine Award and the Stewart Parker Award. Nursen Gömceli 262 Indeed, as reinforced also in Michael Dweyer’s words, Disco Pigs was a remarkable achievement of Enda Walsh immediately in his early career, making the critics “reach for their superlatives.” However, when it was first staged, the play had disturbed its audiences with its high energy and atypical characters who were neither acting like the characters in a traditional play, ‘representing’ lifelike situations, nor speaking a standard language easy to comprehend that would enable them to follow the plotline. Thus, failing to realise the expectations of its audiences used to the conventional theatre experience, Disco Pigs was much criticised for its shocking style of performance and more widely for its language that has been described as ‘odd’, ‘oddly lyrical’ or ‘strange’ in various audience reviews. Indeed, a close look at the expository scene reveals that as soon as the play opens, we are immediately taken into the strange and perplexing world of the two ‘disco pigs’, symbolically named as Pig and Runt, where they are presenting a high-pace re-enactment of their birth in an almost incomprehensible language, as two teenagers looking forward to celebrating their 17 th birthday: 1 Lights flick on. PIG (male) and RUNT (female). They mimic the sound of an ambulance like a child would, ‘bee baa bee baa bee baa! ’. They also mimic the sound of a pregnant woman in labour makes. They say things like ‘is all righ miss’, ‘yadoin fine, luv’, ‘dis da furs is it? ’ ‘is a very fast bee baa, all righ. Have class a water! ’ Sound of a door slamming. Sound of heartbeats throughout. RUNT. Out of the way! ! Jesus out of the way! PIG. Scream da fat nurse wid da gloopy face! RUNT. Da two mams squealin on da trollies dat go speedin down da ward. Oud da fookin way! PIG. My mam she own a liddle ting, look, an dis da furs liddle babba! She have an rip all insie! ! Hol on mam! ! RUNT. My mam she hol in da pain! She noel her pain too well! She been ta hell an bac my mam! […] RUNT. Da trollies dey go on PIG. an on RUNT. an on PIG. an on RUNT. an on PIG. an on RUNT. an on PIG. an on! 1 All the quotes and extracts from the play are taken from Walsh, Disco Pigs and Sucking Dublin. Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 263 RUNT. My mam she suck da pain, grobble it up an sweat it oud da til da liddle skimpy nighty it go, PIG. black wet black. RUNT. Two gold fishys oudda da bowl! ! ! PIG. A gasp gaspin! I’m ja liddle baba commin out! Open up ja big fanny! RUNT. Trollie stop! PIG. An leg open! RUNT. Da fatty nurse schlap on with the rubbery glubs! stop! An leg open! Da two fat sous pooshhh an poooshh ta spit da babas oud! ! PIG. Push girls push! ! RUNT. Scream da das oudsize! PIG. Scream da das oudsize! […] PIG. Bud look a da liddle baba heads! RUNT. Pooosh da baba poosh da head! ! PIG. Pooshh mam poosh! ! Poosh da Pig RUNT. An Poosh da Runt! She wan oud mama! PIG. An he wan oud, ta dada! RUNT. Pooosh sous pooosh! ! PIG. We da liddle born babas! PIG & RUNT: Pooosshhhhhh! Silence. We then hear the sounds of babies crying. Music. RUNT. An it wuz. PIG. Nineteen RUNT. Seventy-nine. PIG. An da liddle baby beebas a Pork Sity take da furs bread inta da whirl (3-5) As can be observed in the extract above, Disco Pigs is puzzling to an audience that expects to see a play which develops in accordance with the conventional methods of drama. Rather than taking the audience into a world of illusion as in traditional drama, where we see a metaphorical representation of reality in a linear fashion through the delivery of the dramatic text by characters as fictional constructs, Disco Pigs immediately takes its audiences into a bizarre world. As soon as the play opens, the audience encounters two characters who are presenting a striking ‘reenactment’ of a past event - their birth - largely through language and sound effects on a stage which is almost bare with only two chairs. The performance of the birth scene takes place in a frenetic pace under the chairs, where the two characters place themselves between the legs of the chairs, which stand here for the mother’s womb 2 . Moreover, the expository action is reflective of the remarkable ‘physicality’ in the play: the actors “mimic” the “sound” of an ambulance and likewise the sound of a pregnant woman in 2 For an illustration see the images on http: / / www.corcadorca.com/ website/ previousproductions/ disco-pigs Nursen Gömceli 264 labour. All throughout this re-enactment, we hear the “sound of heartbeats” in the background, then the “sound of a door slamming”, and finally the “sounds of babies crying”, followed by “music” (3-5). Furthermore, even though the play opens in the present, the audience is immediately taken back into the distant past, going back seventeen years, and is then brought back to the present. Consequently, the handling of dramatic time contradicts the conventional methods, which in a traditional well-made play would display a linear and chronological development. All in all, with these aspects of the expository action, the play immediately establishes itself as distinct from conventional drama. 2. Theatre vs. drama: staging methods in Disco Pigs A close analysis of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs reveals that the play is striking to its audience also with regard to its staging methods. To start with, in the development of the play, we observe that Pig and Runt not only play the parts of all the other characters through role-playing multiple characters, (such as their respective parents, the unnamed woman with whom Pig dances at the nightclub, the bodyguard at the disco of their dreams known as ‘The Palace’, and their friend Foxy, who works at the off-licence), but they also enact their own past and present lives by disrupting the chronological flow of the narrative, as in the opening scene where they take the audience back into their infant years as the new born “liddle baby beebas a Pork Sity” (5), or to their early childhood years via their narratives, in a flashback as in the subsequent scenes. In such acting style, where the performers also ‘mime’ certain scenes, the two characters repeatedly switch roles at a fast pace. Sometimes they speak each other’s lines, function to implicitly give the stage directions and narrate some off-stage events. This is shown in the excerpt below, where, in a rash decision, Pig and Runt get off the bus and rush off to the off-licence where Foxy works: Loud disco/ techno music follows. PIG and RUNT scream and chant ‘Seventeen’. Music eventually stops. Sound of bus stopping. PIG and RUNT get on the bus. PIG. Las time Pig and Runt eva give mona to da bus . . . mus bin a baba, a lease! Why nee ta pass wid any kish? Bus boss he well loaded yeah! Jacussi in sall da bedroams, I bed. So me an Runt jus barrel on! RUNT. Come here to me! ! ! ! PIG. Scream da ugly wase fat cunt of a diver! RUNT. Fook off! PIG. Say Runt. Problem solve yeah! Easy. He noel his place. Sits. Drive da bus on. Slow. I sees him liddle eyes in da mirror! He scare in da eyes! Pig raise da han . . . Bus fass now. Good. Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 265 RUNT. Bus stop . . . stop bus! PIG (recognises someone). Oh yes. Yes. RUNT laughs. PIG. Foxy locksy, in it? RUNT. Is Pig. PIG (stands). A birrday giff! Cova me, girl! RUNT. Will, Pig. PIG. Righ so! Hi dee hi! PIG mimes kicking Foxy around the place. RUNT narrates. RUNT. Pig an Foxy go all da way! Pig hate Foxy! One nigh, yeah, Pig he gasp for da glug glug glug glug! Down ta Black cruel we drool. Off licence warFoxy work. Did work mo like. PIG. Free drink, pretty please. RUNT. No, ney panic button Foxy he panic. He say ‘I can’t Darren’. Pig he get da buzz in da ead he wanna fisty! PIG. I ass ya nice, nice man! Han fuckin ova! RUNT. ‘You know I can’t’. PIG. I fuckin kill ya! RUNT. ‘Darren! ’ PIG. I get ja mam fuckin burn her, boy! RUNT. ‘The boss wil kill me, Darr . . .! ’ PIG. A shut yer gob, shut yer gob, shut yer gob […]! PIG mouths RUNT’s lines below. RUNT. Took Pig ten mins smash all buddels in dat drink shap. All but one yeah. Pig take the buddel Bacardi slinky . . . he kiss da buddel . . . an off. ‘Pig! Jar pock-full a tens! ’ He stamp na Foxy face. Da nose like tomato it go squish n’drip drop. Foxy cried, cried like his mam jus bin smack in da ead by da golf club . . . which she war . . . nex day. PIG. Shmackkk! ! ! RUNT. Pig hate da Foxy. He hate em. PIG. Schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack schmack! ! An let dat be a less on ya Foxy! Dis bus is no purr you! ! ! (8-10) As can be seen in the above scene, even in this short part in the play, several methods of performance are employed in combination with each other at various stages of its development: the technique of narration (e.g. Runt narrating the violent deed of Pig), the technique of miming (e.g. Pig miming the act of kicking his friend Foxy in the off-licence) and the method of multiple role-playing (e.g. Runt acting both as a narrator to Pig’s violent encounter with Foxy and speaking the part of Foxy, while acting in her role as Runt). Through these techniques, which are soon established as the main patterns of acting for the rest of the play, the ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ aspect of the play takes precedence over the ‘drama’ (i.e. dialogue). This runs counter to the norm in traditional theatre where drama is at the centre Nursen Gömceli 266 of all the other elements, like character, plot, setting and performance. In return, these methods of acting in Disco Pigs make the audience feel drawn out of their ‘comfort zones’, as they are deprived of their “comfortable conventional marks” (Bouko 33). The audience is no longer given a ‘representation’ of a real life situation via a dramatic action performed by recognisable characters in a recognisable setting within a logical and linear, chronological flow. With the absence of such a structure, which would be found in a conventional play, and not being given a direct illusion of reality, the audience in Disco Pigs is left with the responsibility of rendering the abstract images in the dialogues of the performers (like the stage-set, the props on stage, the physical appearances, gestures and movements of the off-stage characters) concrete in their own imagination. In other words, the audience is forced to use their imagination in order to ‘see’ the ‘nonrepresented’ off-stage scenes which are presented to them either through miming or via the technique of narration. As a result, spectators are expected to develop their individual sense of perception in the creation of meaning. With these aspects, Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs deviates to a great extent from the norms of conventional drama and makes the audience constantly aware that what they see on stage is a ‘theatre’, rather than a drama, thus “propos[ing] a theatre beyond representation” (Barnett 15). At this stage, it might be useful to refer to the performance theorist Richard Schechner, whose description on the distinction between ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’, and in close association, ‘script’ and ‘performance’ respectively, might give an insight into the role of each in the interpretation of a play. In Schechner’s words, “the drama is what the writer writes; the script is the interior map [including stage directions] of a particular production”, whereas “the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performers in any given performance”, and “the performance is the whole event, including audience and performers (technicians, too, anyone who is there)” (87). Moreover, Schechner’s theory makes a distinction between two levels in the theatre, which he examines under classification of “manifestation” and “transmission”. Accordingly, he suggests that among the four main components of theatre, ‘drama’ (i.e. dialogue) and ‘script’ function to fulfil the task of “transmission”, which means the communication of the content through dialogue, hence direct communication of the message. ‘Theatre’ and ‘performance’, on the other hand, fulfil the task of “manifestation”, which is the demonstration of the content through ‘doing’ and ‘showing’ (69; Bouko 28). Applying this theory to Enda Walsh’s play, in light of the introductory analysis of the play as presented above, it will be true to state that of all the four components of theatre, Disco Pigs with its staging methods promotes ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’, while keeping ‘drama’ and ‘script’ as secondary. This can perhaps be accepted as evidenced also in the introductory notes to the play’s production details, where it is stressed that the play “was Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 267 workshopped for a week prior to rehearsals” (2). According to Schechner, the workshop, during which “special gestures arise”, is “a way of playing around with reality, a means of examining behavior by reordering, exaggerating, fragmenting, recombining, and adumbrating it”, which in return leads to “expressive, symbolic, playful, ritualized, ‘scripted’ behaviour” (110). In other words, it is through workshopping that various forms of ‘doing’ and ‘showing’ the action can effectively be explored. Correspondingly, the conclusion can be drawn that not only with its staging methods but also with its background as a play that has reached the stage of production through workshopping, Disco Pigs appears as a model for a theatre that foregrounds the ‘manifestation’ dimension of the theatre by putting emphasis on ‘doing’ and ‘showing’ the action, or rather the ‘selected circumstances’, which are (further) developed through workshopping. With this composition, Disco Pigs fits well into the category of what the performance theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann designates as ‘postdramatic theatre’ in his landmark work with the same title, allowing thus for a postdramatic analysis of the play. 3. Language in Disco Pigs As stated by O’Gorman, giving the audience an “awareness of total ‘theatre situation’ is a key aim of postdramatic theatre practice” (90), and this is what Enda Walsh achieves in Disco Pigs at three main levels: with the predominating high-energy physicality, by puzzling the audience to the extent of making them search for a ‘meaning’ through the acting/ staging methods and with its highly unusual language employed uninterruptedly by the two performers on stage throughout the play. As Pat Kiernan, the artistic director of Corcadorca broadly describes in a recent interview for the Irish Times, Disco Pigs is basically “a play for two actors, with two chairs, that could go anywhere” (Murphy, et al.). Yet behind this apparent simplicity of the play, there are many factors that expose the spectators to a highly confusing ‘theatre situation’, which need to be ‘decoded’ by the viewers according to their individual perception. In the first place, as it has already been mentioned in this discussion, the linguistic dimension of the play is perhaps the most striking element in this theatre, which requires great attention both from the spectators of the performance and the readers of the play text. As will be noticed in the given extracts, Disco Pigs, which could be described as Enda Walsh’s ‘experimentation with language’, is written in a way to reflect the Cork accent and dialect as closely as possible in its music, rhythm and lexical variety. However, what makes Enda Walsh’s language extraordinary, and perhaps complicated, is his creative use of phrases, of sounds and his wordplay and invented vocabulary mixed with the Cork Nursen Gömceli 268 accent. All together their musical effect creates almost a “second ‘auditory stage‘“(Lehmann 88) which is challengingly open to the creation of a variety of meanings, as promoted in postdramatic theatre. A mixture of baby-talk and the Cork accent, the language employed by Pig and Runt is an idiosyncratic language which can be fully understood only by the two teenagers who have never parted from each other since their birth. Adding to this, Pig and Runt also resort to a ‘piggy language’ at times when their private world is intruded by strangers, who could also be their parents. This private language combines moments of silence with ‘oinking’ in imitation of the sounds pigs make. In the play, this is an effective strategy that enables the two close friends to quietly continue their private communication in the presence of the intruders, while on the surface it seems to be obstructing their free talk. At this point, it might be interesting to point out that this was a motif inspired by Enda Walsh’s reading of the story of the Gibbons sisters, the black Welsh twins known as ‘the silent sisters’ who had developed their own private language, a sort of cryptophasia, in order to avoid communication with people outside their immediate family, as documented by Marjorie Wallace in her work The Silent Twins (Walsh, “Transformer”). In the play, Runt’s retrospective narrative in the form of a monologue, delivered as she is sitting in a burger place together with Pig, gives us an account of the background to their invented, private language. At the same time, she discloses the truth about their names as their own invention, which symbolically suggests that Pig and Runt have also created an identity for themselves in their self-created world: RUNT. Our two mams all sweety an stinking a new born babas n’ blood! I member open an look my eyes an ja see a liddle baba in the nex bed. An dat liddle baba he look righ inta me, yeah. Our mams all da full of happy but da new babys say an do no-ting. We look cross da liddle-big space tween da beds . . . I see own him an he own see me. Deez liddle babies ned no-ting else. So off home we go all packed! An da baby houses side by side la! . . . an birrday in birrday out . . . us togedder. An peeplah call me Sinead an call Pig Darren but one day we war playin in da playroom be-an animols on da farm an Darren play da Pig an I play da Runt! An dat wuz it! An every beddy time pur mams pull us away from da odder one. ‘Say night to Sinead, Darren’. But Pig jus look ta me an ans (Snorts an oink.) An I noel what he mean. So we grow up a bit at a dime an all dat dime we silen when odders roun. No word no-ting. An wen ten arrive we squeak a diffren way den odders. An da hole a da estate dey talk at us. Look nasty yeah. But me an Pig look stray at dem. An we looka was happenin an we make a whirl where Pig an Runt jar king an queen! (15) Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 269 As deduced from Runt’s narrative, the private language Pig and Runt have developed for their communication functions like a protective shield for them preventing others from entering their ‘kingdom’. They speak in a way ‘different from the others’, ‘keep silent’ when there are other people around and if ever they have to communicate at such moments, then they resort to their piggy language ‘imitating the sounds’ pigs produce, decoded only by themselves. Additionally, their dense use of teenage/ youth slang, largely unknown to people outside their generation with its style and vocabulary plays a role in their ‘different speech’, making their private communication unintelligible to outsiders. With such features, the linguistic dimension of the play proves to be highly challenging, making the communication of the message difficult and eventually leading to the ‘suspension of meaning’, while bringing the ‘delivery’ of this strange language and the ‘musicality of the text’ into the foreground. This, in turn, reveals the playwright’s postdramatic approach to his material in accordance with Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre practice (12, 91-4; Bouko 34). As he discloses in diverse interviews, Enda Walsh had deliberately chosen the Cork accent for his characters, since he believes in its musical effect; yet he also admits that he was aware that this would be a challenge for the audience as well as the performers, just like it is for the readers of the text. Interestingly enough, being a Dubliner, Enda Walsh himself does not have any first-hand experience of the Cork accent. However, what Walsh had carried to the stage linguistically was so successful in its authenticity that he has received great admiration from theatre critics for his unique way of recreating the “cadences of everyday Cork speech in its rhythm, music, pattern, grammar” (Clancy 35) with “vigour and precision” (James, “Crispy Bacon” 31). Thus, he gained immediate recognition in his early career as the playwright who “represented Cork in a way that brings it more fully alive than anything else ever written about it” (Hanrahan 96). Enda Walsh explains in an interview how he had to deal with an accent he himself could not understand so easily, with his move from Dublin to Cork in 1992, where he lived for two years: They had the maddest accent, I was going, “I have no idea what they are saying! ”. . . it was sort of, it was sort of like trying to learn a dialect, . . . and I wrote Disco Pigs directly after it, which was my dialogue with Cork about, “Why are you talking like that? ! ”(“In Conversation: Joe Dowling and Enda Walsh”). As revealed in his interviews, Walsh accepts that “the way the play is written” makes it “very difficult for the first few minutes, so you create the illusion for the audience that they’re learning the language by then making it a little simpler”, yet his primary expectation is that the audiences “appreciate the musicality” foregrounded in the Cork accent (Barry A7). In a way to ‘comfort’ those spectators who wouldn’t understand the language at all as strangers to the accent just as they would not understand it because of Nursen Gömceli 270 the densely used teenage slang, he adds: “my father saw it and, afterwards, he told me he’d understood three words all night: ‘Sonia O’Sullivan’” (Barry A7), the name of the Irish former athlete mentioned in passing in one scene. In a similar fashion, he states elsewhere that “even Cork audiences will get only 85% of what Pig and Runt say” (“Pigspotting” 44). Indeed, as a native of Cork, Cillian Murphy, too, the well-known Irish screen and stage actor whose successful collaboration with Enda Walsh started with Disco Pigs, where he played the part of Pig, admits in an interview for the Irish Times that he found the play “completely impenetrable” when he first saw the text: “Disco Pigs was really quite dense. Enda had created a new kind of language. So I didn’t really know how to read it, but I sensed that it was challenging, and kind of new, and that there were two parts” (Murphy). Hence, emerging as a play whose language is challenging to be performed in its rhythm, fast pace, its fragmented structure, sounds and accent even to a native speaker, language in Disco Pigs “eventually” appears “as the most important thing” in the play, as Pat Kiernan has expressed. Additionally, he has admitted: “And that [language] was also the one where we recognised that we wanted to bring our work outside of Cork. It took us all over the world, really” (Kiernan). At this point, it might be useful to look more closely at the understanding of the function of language in postdramatic theory in light of Lehmann’s analysis and interpretation. To start with, as different from the idea of the ‘text’ in conventional text-based theatre where the text has the authority over all the other elements of drama and the primary function of language is therefore ‘linguistic communication’ as an element of ‘representation’, postdramatic theatre “attacks language’s function of representation” (Lehmann 146). In the understanding of postdramatic theory, the text is “to a large extent a ‘no longer dramatic’ theatre text” and is regarded only as “a ‘material’ of the scenic creation, not as its ‘master’” (Lehmann 17). In other words, just as postdramatic theory rejects any hierarchy, so it dethrones the position of language as a major element of ‘transmission’; instead of occupying the “status of illusory reality” (Lehmann 17) on stage, it thus functions as an element of ‘theatricality’. Consequently, rather than accomplishing the task of enabling the spectators to understand the character and follow the flow of the narrative within the text, language in postdramatic theatre appears as a “disturbing reality on stage” with its “’position’ of tones, words, sentences, sounds that are hardly controlled by a ‘meaning’” but instead “by a visual, not text-oriented dramaturgy” (Lehmann 146). With such an approach to language, in this theatre the “principle of exposition” is applied to “body, gesture and voice” of the performer instead of text and character. Thus, language in the postdramatic text moves away from suggesting an immediate ‘meaning’ and becomes like Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 271 an “exhibited object”, open to interpretation according to the individual perception of the spectators (Lehmann 147). If this theory is applied to Disco Pigs, with its privileging of ‘musicality’ over semantic meaning, which is achieved through the Cork accent and dialect with the playwright’s choice of phrases, vocabulary, grammatical and lexical items and with the peculiar arrangement of sound patterns, rhythmic structure, repetition of sounds (e.g. mainly in the form of alliteration and assonance) and of phrases in the whole text, all of which can be seen immediately in the opening scene to the play, it will be true to state that in a postdramatic approach Enda Walsh indeed transforms language into an ‘exhibited object’. Hence, language in Disco Pigs functions more for ‘manifestation’ than for ‘signification’, demonstrating “the performative capacity of language itself” (James, personal communication). Musicality, which can be achieved in a performance via the (additional) noises and sounds in the background or via the performer’s voice or the combination of the two, is described as an important sign usage in postdramatic theory of theatre. Achieved in Disco Pigs largely through the sounds and rhythm of the Cork accent, which is like the discovery of another music within the play text, this musicality of the Cork accent with its intensity turns the play into a performance with its own musical richness where the audience is forced to focus on the increased sound effects rather than the semantic meaning. As a result, meaning is suspended and the spectators are led to develop the idea of “theatre as music” rather than the “role of music” in theatre. This fits the expectation in the practice of postdramatic theatre (Lehmann, 91-2). Moreover, the strong Cork accent in Disco Pigs, which makes the play unintelligible to many spectators, almost functions to create the effects of the incomprehensible sounds of a foreign language. In effect, the language of the play is taken to a level “beyond the immediate level of linguistic semantics”, while its “own distinctive music” (Lehmann 92) is gradually established. As Pat Kiernan has truthfully remarked in an interview with Mary Leland, this is perhaps one of the major factors that has taken Disco Pigs “all over the world”, making the play an international hit immediately after it was staged for audiences outside Cork as well. Considering this dimension of the play, it can well be claimed that Disco Pigs with its linguistic elements and capacities for its own musicality is a unique example of postdramatic performance that transgresses the boundaries of nationality, while still being strongly Irish in its accent and dialect. On the whole, with such an approach to language in postdramatic theatre also the role of the actor, who is responsible for transferring the scripted language in the text to the audience, undergoes a transformation since postdramatic theory breaks the close tie between the text and the character observed in conventional drama. Since the text itself is accepted as Nursen Gömceli 272 a performance factor in postdramatic theory, in this theatre “dramatic ‘character’” is replaced by the “’text bearer’”, the performer whose primary responsibility is to deliver the text, without interpreting it (Barnett 18). This, in turn, invites a redefinition of the performer’s function “in terms of being and materiality rather than appearance and mimetic imitation” (Balme 1), introducing the element of ‘physicality’. 4. Physicality in Disco Pigs An outstanding characteristic of Enda Walsh’s theatre, physicality in Disco Pigs appears as a striking element as soon as the performance starts, where Pig and Runt present a high-pace re-enactment of their birth on an empty stage, with two chairs as the only props. As the play further develops, the stage remains empty throughout the performance, while Pig and Runt continue generating a restless energy on stage, as reflective of the emotional states of teenagers bursting with energy. Reflected also in the pace and rhythm of their vibrant language of “pulsating eloquence” (Gardner), physicality in Disco Pigs not only occurs at the level of ‘acting with the body’ but also at the level of the “union of the voice and language” (Lehmann 96). This, however, is an aspect which is possible to be analysed in depth ‘in performance’, rather than in the text. The extract below provides a further example in addition to the excerpts already presented in this study: Music stops. PIG. En ter tain ment! Ya on? ! ! RUNT. Wat? PIG&RUNT. En-ter-tain-ment! RUNT. Now Pig? PIG. Off out yeah! ? RUNT. Wer da bobs so! ? PIG. A few bobs, Runt! Wat ya say? ! RUNT. Tonigh, Pig! Now? PIG. Seventeen, yeah! RUNT. Yeah! PIG. Well les make up to flip out, yeah? ! RUNT AND PIG. Up up up up up up up up up up up! PIG. Raceyaso! ! ! RUNT. Fook yes! ! (21) With its fast pace and rhythm, the language Pig and Runt employ is expressive of the energy behind the words they utter, making indeed the impression that they are ready for some ‘race’. The end to Pig and Runt’s ‘entertainment’ in celebration of their 17 th birthday at a disco, however, is a Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 273 scene of violence, which is presented through miming but ‘comes alive’ and is made ‘visible’ in the ‘union of voice and language’ as well as in the body of Pig in performance, as shown in the text that follows: RUNT holds out her hand which we imagine is being kissed. PIG. An thru da pump pump pump a da disco dance I see it all! Pig on his marks an all set as misty hansome move in on Runt an RUNT. Kiss my hand. PIG. An das my queue! Ova I move! Move real fass, yeah! Scream ou loud I scream an grab da liddle fuck an Runt she say, RUNT. Jesus Pig no! No! ! ! PIG. Oud oud oud oud oud oud OUD OUD OUD! ! ! ! ! ! Take oud! Move oudda da fuckin way! Door open shut! Throw! You dirty liddle fuck she my girlfren bollix! Smash! Kassshhh! Open da nose da eye! Blood blood blood! An Smashhh smasshhhh smash! I am da king ya […]! Ashtray! Smash kaasshhhh head smasshhh! Head crack op! She mine, luvver boy. She my girl! Me an her, king an queen ya bad boy! Scream baby liddle baby scream an SMASH SMASH SMASH . . . SMASHHH! ! ! ! ! (29) As seen in the excerpts above, Pig and Runt make the spectators ‘feel’ the emotions and feelings they are enacting on stage and make them ‘see’ not only their feelings of excitement and joy but also a violent encounter with a third character who is absent from the stage through ‘physicality’, where also the sound patterns they create in the language they speak play a role. In other words, the text of the play does not provide the spectators with any ‘linguistic input’ of any feeling or emotion, but rather it expects them to ‘see’ the feelings and emotions in their ‘manifestation’ through the presence and performance of the actors. Hence, like Mikel Murfi, the acclaimed Irish actor and director who has worked with Enda Walsh on several projects, has put it at the post-show talk to Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk (2014): the spectators are expected to interpret the “physical language along with the verbal” (Galway International). Moreover, while the bare stage in Disco Pigs throughout the performance “allows the manipulation of environment, of space itself, to allow the imagination of the audience to be freed” (Stevenson 4), the fragment of action presented through miming, through “physicality and gesticulation” (Lehmann 95) of the performers, enables the spectators to focus their attention completely on the “presence of the performers” (Lehmann 111), hence to produce meaning independent of any authorial manipulation and of each other. Such performance style of course requires actors “of presence” and actors “large enough to fill the empty space” (Stevenson 4). This is what Enda Walsh, too, obviously expects of the performers he works with, as Cillian Murphy affirms. In his interview with Wallace, where he talks about the production of Disco Pigs and his experience of working together with Enda Walsh in general, Murphy says: Nursen Gömceli 274 “Enda is pushing me to act with my body.” Similarly, in an interview for the Irish Times the playwright himself puts stress on the idea of ‘energy’ when talking about Disco Pigs and their work for Corcadorca: “we’re trying to create energy on stage” (Meany A3). Consequently, having started out with this objective, the “exposition of intense physicality” (Lehmann 96) appears as yet another main feature of postdramatic theatre practice that Enda Walsh retains in Disco Pigs. Towards the closure of this analysis, it should be briefly pointed out that Disco Pigs differs from ‘dramatic theatre’ also in the sense that “sequential connections of action/ plot” (Lehmann 88) are mainly absent from its texture, which too is a feature of ‘postdramatic theatre’. Rather than presenting itself as an organic whole with explicit logical connections, the play exposes the audience to a selection of scenes/ circumstances from the two days in Pig and Runt’s life, changing from one ‘new state’ into the other, where not the logic behind these scenes is aimed at but Pig and Runt’s shared experiences in various ‘circumstances’ or ‘situations’ over forty-eight hours; the outcome is a ‘patchwork’ of selected scenes making up the whole. As Lehmann shows in his theory, this fragmentation in action prevents the spectators from identifying themselves with the characters on stage, and makes them concentrate entirely on the “physical actions and presence of the players” (108) without being ‘carried away’ with the action. Thus, like in many other examples of postdramatic theatre, in Disco Pigs, too, the overall effect created is comparable to that of “the spectator spend[ing] an evening at [Pig and Runt’s] (not ‘with’ them)” (Lehmann 109). 5. Conclusion On the whole, it can be stated that with its preference for the ‘manifestation’ of ‘selected scenes’ rather than the transmission of a central message within a unified action, its focus on ‘musicality’ in language rather than the linguistic communication of the text, and giving prominence to ‘physicality’ and ‘energy’ in performance instead of the balanced union of text and character as practised in a conventional play, Enda Walsh in Disco Pigs creates a theatre situation where the audiences are puzzled to the extent of searching for a meaning. By this means, the playwright prevents the spectators from identifying themselves with the characters, and just as the playwright pushes the performers to use their full capacities to create the energy he aims at having on stage, so does he confront his audiences with his play “in intellectual and physical ways” (Bouko 34). With these characteristic features, Disco Pigs, which is perhaps above all linguistically highly challenging for its audiences worldwide, presents an outstanding example of ‘postdramatic’ theatre which is not a complete break away from Language and physicality in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs 275 the ‘dramatic’ but departs from the dramatic at a considerable degree as a “playful exploration of what is possible beyond [the] horizon” (Lehmann 27) of drama. References Balme, Christopher. 2004. Editorial. Theatre Research International 29 (1): 1-3. JSTOR. Web. 25 November 2016. <https: / / www.cambridge.org/ core/ services/ aopcambridge-core/ content/ view/ 152FD4B9880439301D709D50B668F590/ S0307883303001202a.pdf/ editorial.pdf>. Barnett, David. 2008. When is a play not a drama? Two examples of postdramatic theatre texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14-23. Web. 25 November 2016. <https: / / www.cambridge.org/ core/ services/ aop-cambridgecore/ content/ view/ S0266464X0800002X>. Barry, Kevin. Leeward Drift. 1997. Review of Disco Pigs, by Enda Walsh. Irish Times, 8 July: A7. Bouko, Catherine. 2009. The musicality of postdramatic theater: Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of independent auditory semiotics. Référence Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 17: 25-35. Web. 25 November 2016. <http: / / www.enl.auth.gr/ gramma/ gramma09/ bouko.pdf>. Clancy, Luke. 1999. Enda’s Irish pigs take flight. Times 28, April: 35. Dwyer, Michael. 2000. Light on their trotters. Review of Disco Pigs, by Enda Walsh. Irish Times, 6 May. Web. 25 November 2016. <http: / / www.irishtimes.com/ news/ light-on-their-trotters-1.268173>. Galway International Arts Festival. 2014. Backstage at the festival: Ballyturk. Postshow talk with the cast and playwright. Black Box Theatre, Galway, 16 July. Gardner, Lyn. 1999. Beyond the Disco Pigs. Review of Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh. Guardian, 28 April. Web. 25 November 2016. <https: / / www.theguardian.com/ culture/ 1999/ apr/ 28/ artsfeatures3>. Hanrahan, Johnny. 2001. Theatre in Cork/ Cork in theatre: an excercise in perspective. In Dermot Bolger (ed.), Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre, 91-103. Dublin: Colour Books. James, Allan Richard. Personal communication. 23 March 2016. James, Christopher. 1998. Crispy bacon flavour. Review of Disco Pigs, by Enda Walsh. Times, 17 June: 31. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. By Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge. Kiernan, Pat. 2006. Drama takes to the streets. Interview by Mary Leland. Irish Times, 15 May. Web. 25 November 2016. <http: / / www.irishtimes.com/ culture/ dramatakes-to-the-streets-1.1003152>. Meany, Helen. 1996. Going for it and getting there. Review of Disco Pigs, by Enda Walsh. Irish Times, 24 September: A3. Nursen Gömceli 276 Murphy, Cillian. 2011. Old blue eyes is back on stage. Interview by Arminta Wallace. Irish Times, 2 July. Web. 26 November 2016. <http: / / www.irishtimes.com/ culture/ stage/ old-blue-eyes-is-back-on-stage-1.590421>. Murphy, Cillian, Eileen Walsh, Enda Walsh & Pat Kiernan. 2016. Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh on Disco Pigs: it was the ignorance of youth. Interview by Peter Crawley. Irish Times, 20 April. Web. 26 November 2016. <http: / / www.irishtimes .com/ culture/ stage/ cillian-murphy-and-eileen-walsh-ondisco-pigs-it-was-theignorance-ofyouth-1.2624936>. O’Gorman, Finian. 2015. The small things: a postdramatic analysis. In Mary Caulfield & Ian R. Walsh (eds.), The Theatre of Enda Walsh, 89-104. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Pigspotting and Bong shopping in Pork Sity. Sunday Independent 12 October 1997: 44. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Stevenson, Darren. n.d. A case for physical theatre. Push Theatre, 1-6. Web. 26 November 2016. <http: / / www.pushtheatre.org/ case-for-physical-theatre.html>. Walsh, Enda. 1997. Disco Pigs and Sucking Dublin. London: Nick Hern. Walsh, Enda. 2010. In Conversation: Joe Dowling and Enda Walsh. Interview by Joe Dowling. Youtube. Walker Art Center, 25 May. Web. 27 November 2016. <https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=BCJdK-U1Q-4>. Walsh, Enda. 2001. Transformer -Interview with Enda Walsh. Interview by Jon Patrick. Film Ireland 82: 17-19. Contributors Carmen M. Amerstorfer: Carmen M. Amerstorfer is researcher and teacher trainer at the Department of English at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU). She has teaching experience in EFL and ESP at educational institutions in Austria, the Netherlands, and China. She has taught foreign language learners of all ages and educational levels from pre-k to tertiary. Carmen’s main research interests include learner-centred teaching approaches, strategic language learning, and psychology in language learning. In her position as deputy chair of the School of Education at AAU, Carmen works on improving teacher education programmes and cooperation among educational institutions in Austria and across the globe. Miriam H. Auer: Miriam H. Auer, Mag.a Dr.in phil., teacher at Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, writer, poet, lyricist, researcher, lifelong learner, human rights-, animal rightsas well as environmental activist, thinker, dreamer, hoper with a research focus on empathy in medial production and reception of multimodal texts and the creative integration of fragmented identities; Master’s Thesis: ’In the prison of their days’: Intertextual and Intermedial References to Poets and their Works in English with a Special Focus on Poetic Homage. Klagenfurt 2009; Dissertation: Poetry in Motion and Emotion. Klagenfurt 2014; Fiction: Hinter der Zeit. Edition Meerauge/ Verlag Heyn, Klagenfurt 2014; Knochenfische. Edition Meerauge, 2017 Buket Bıdık: Buket Bıdık was born in Istanbul in 1990, and since 2004 she has been focusing on Language Studies. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 2013 in American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University in Turkey, she completed her Masters in Applied Linguistics, at Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt in Austria. For her M.A. thesis, she conducted research in the areas of Language Acquisition and Testing, Error Analysis, and Developmental Stages of EFL Writing. Currently, she is working in the field of IT in the Netherlands to develop an understanding of Computational Linguistics to extend her research interests to NLP. Contributors 278 Gregor Chudoba: Gregor Chudoba grew up singing national anthems of Austria, the UK, Turkey and Germany. After graduating from Graz University in Applied Linguistics and a post-graduate certificate in Foreign Language Teaching, ended up teaching languages, linguistics and drama at universities in Croatia, Hungary and Austria. Senior Lecturer at Klagenfurt University since 2012. Focus of interest in phonetics, the teaching of pronunciation and in drama in education. Ivana Cvekić: Ivana Cvekić is currently attending her doctoral studies in psycholinguistics at the Braunschweig University of Technology. Her areas of interest are multilingualism and cross-linguistic influence. Quite similarly, her doctoral thesis investigates L1 and L2 transfer during L3 processing. She is currently focusing on the combination of Serbo-Croatian, German and English in a multilingual context. Moreover, her research includes online experimental methods, such as eye-tracking and reaction time computers. Werner Delanoy: Werner Delanoy is associate professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. His main areas of research are interand transcultural learning perspectives, literature teaching, language education, and contemporary British culture and literature. His main publications include Fremdsprachlicher Literaturunterricht: Theorie und Praxis als Dialog (2002), Cultural Studies in the EFL Classroom (2006; with Laurenz Volkmann), Future Perspectives for English Language Teaching (2008; with Laurenz Volkmann) and Learning with Literature in the EFL Classroom (2015; with Maria Eisenmann and Frauke Matz). Nikola Dobrić: Dr. Nikola Dobrić is an Assistant Professor (Post-Doc Assistant) in English linguistics at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in Austria. He holds a doctorate in English linguistics from the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt (Austria). His current research focuses on the use of learner corpora in investigating different issues of language testing (such as test validation and writing scales). He has published in the fields of corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, semantics, lexicography, and sociolinguistics. He is the Chief Contributors 279 Editor of the philological journal Colloquium and is also invested in promoting more open access to research. Ursula Doleschal: Ursula Doleschal is full professor for Slavic linguistics and head of the writing center at the University of Klagenfurt / Austria. Her research interests include bilingual speech, gender linguistics, theory of grammar, academic texts and the teaching of academic writing. Her publications are on several Slavic languages as well as on German and Italian. She is vicepresident of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliches Schreiben (GEWISSS) and the Austrian association of Slavists. Vanessa Erat: Vanessa Erat is a graduate student in English & American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. She has published on marginalization processes in Mass Effect for an essay collection born out of the 7 th Global Meeting of the Videogame Cultures Project at Mansfield College, Oxford. Her contribution to the 2016 Conference of the Canadian Game Studies Association at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, titled “Indigenous Culture and History in the Design of the Dragon Age Elves”, is the starting point for her graduate thesis which she is currently working on. Dušan Gabrovšek: Dušan Gabrovšek obtained B.A. degrees in French and English at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in general and English linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Full Professor of English in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Supervised close to 300 BAs, MAs, and PhDs. Author of monograph Sidewalks and Pavements, of lexicology textbook Words Galore, author-editor of Slovene-English dictionary of false friends (2004). Chief adviser on lexicography for the Oxford-DZS Comprehensive English-Slovenian Dictionary (2005-2006). Member of the Editorial Board of journal ELOPE. Main research fields: lexicography, phraseology, crosslinguistic studies. Contributors 280 Nursen Gömceli: Nursen Gömceli has specialised in the area of British drama, and her main research interests are in Irish drama and theatre, contemporary British drama, British feminist drama and feminist theory. Her national and international publications are in the areas of drama and performance, literary linguistics, and feminist drama and theatre. Major publication: Timberlake Wertenbaker and Contemporary British Feminist Drama (Palo Alto, California: Academica Press, 2010). Eva-Maria Graf: Eva-Maria Graf is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and English Linguistics at Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt (Austria). She received her PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, where she worked as an assistant professor. She also worked at the University of St. Gallen and is currently associated with the Züricher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaft (ZHAW).Her research interests and publications are in the areas of applied linguistics with a focus on helping professions, in particular coaching and psychotherapy, gender ideologies in language and social interaction and queer linguistics. Together with two colleagues she launched the first academic journal on coaching research in the German speaking market. In a more recent project, together with colleagues from psychology and German linguistics, she investigates into forms and functions of questions in coaching from an interdisciplinary perspective. Jörg Helbig: Jörg Helbig, professor for English and American literature and culture studies at the Alpe-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. Major areas of research: film and media history, erotic cinema, film narratology, popular culture of the 1960s, intertextuality and intermediality. Recent book publications: Horror-Kultfilme (Marburg 2017 with A. Fabris and A. Russegger), Science- Fiction-Kultfilme (Marburg 2016 with A. Fabris), I saw a film today, oh boy! Die Beatles Film Enzyklopädie (Marburg 2016), Digitale Spiele (Köln 2016 with R. Schallegger), Visuelle Medien (Köln 2014 with A. Rußegger and R. Winter), Visualität, Kultur und Gesellschaft (Köln 2014 with A. Rußegger and R. Winter). Contributors 281 Margret Holt: Margret Holt B.A., M.A., Cert.Ed. - As an educator, has spent many a year aiding students to improve their language skills as tools for critical thinking and exploring knowledge and understanding, that they may become inspired individuals. As a researcher, the main fields have been Children’s and Young Adult Fiction; Visual Culture; British Literature and Culture - specifically that of the 19th.c. Has published articles on a variety of topics. Bernhard Kettemann: Bernhard Kettemann is retired Professor of English linguistics at the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He has been head of Department and Dean of Studies of the Humanities there, he is founder and editor of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, was co-editor of Moderne Sprachen, member of governing boards of VERBAL (the Austrian Association of Applied Linguistics), of VÖN (the Austrian Modern Languages Association), of AAUTE (the Austrian Association of University Teachers of English) and is now the president of ÖAG, the Austrian- American Society of Styria. His research interests include Cultural Constructionism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus linguistics and Semiotics of the media. Smiljana Komar: Dr. Smiljana Komar is a Professor of Linguistics at the English Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She teaches English phonetics, phonology and intonation, Contrastive English-Slovene phonetics, English discourse analysis and Discourse intonation. Her main research area is linguistics, especially the fields of phonetics, phonology, prosody, discourse analysis and pragmatics. She has published at home and abroad and is the author of a contrastive English-Slovene monograph on intonation, entitled Communicative Functions of Intonation: English-Slovene Contrastive Analysis (2008). Her current research interests are in the multimodality of TV ads and cooking shows. She is also a co-editor of ELOPE, the academic journal of the Slovene Association for the Study of English. Contributors 282 Alexander Onysko: Alexander Onysko is Full Professor in English linguistics at Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt. Before, he held an Associate Professorship in English linguistics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, was Senior Researcher in multilingualism at EURAC (European Academy) in Bolzano, and worked as a post-doctoral researcher on an FWF-funded project on Late Modern English dialectology at the University of Innsbruck. As visiting professor he taught at the University of Hamburg (2008/ 2009), the University of Bochum (2009), the University of Innsbruck (2009/ 2010), and the University of Gothenburg (2014). His main research interests and publications are in the fields of World Englishes, Language Contact, Bi/ Multilingualism, and Cognitive Linguistics. Stefano Quaino: Stefano Quaino was born in Udine, Italy in 1975. After a successful career as a cellist, he earned a master degree (2008) and a PhD (2011) in English Linguistics under the supervision of Allan James (University of Klagenfurt) and Robert Penhallurick (Swansea University). In his dissertation, he thoroughly described the intonation patterns of Welsh English, combining his musical knowledge with the main linguistic theories. After teaching English Linguistics at the University in Klagenfurt for one year, he moved to China. Currently, he is an English teacher in an international high school in Shanghai. Stefan Rabitsch: Stefan ‘Steve’ Rabitsch is an assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Graz and teaches courses in American cultural history at the University of Klagenfurt. His first monograph, Star Trek’s Secret British History will be published by McFarland later this year. His research and his classes are dominated by American Culture Studies together with a pronounced focus on Science Fiction Studies across media. He is appreciative of the label ‘Academic Trekkie’ which is occasionally attached to his name. His research and teaching endeavors are complemented by a comprehensive knowledge of and exposure to (hi)stories and identities of empire and exploration found in both the American West and the transatlantic imaginarium of the high seas. Contributors 283 Guenther Sigott: Guenther Sigott is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt. He has worked as a teacher and translator for general and specific purpose French and English and has taught a large range of university language courses, semantics, lexicology, text linguistics, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, research methodology and language testing. He has also worked as a teacher trainer and acted as a consultant to large-scale national test development projects for English, German and the Classical Languages. His publication focus is on C-test research and language test validation in general. He is co-editor, together with Rüdiger Grotjahn and Claudia Harsch, of the international book series Language Testing and Evaluation published by Peter Lang. His research interests are in all areas of Applied Linguistics and particularly in Language Testing and Evaluation. Heinz Tschachler: Heinz Tschachler is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. His academic interests are relations between representation, ideology, and material conditions as well as, more recently, the cultural dimensions of America’s money. He believes that coins and currency not merely encourage trade and investment but are at the same time cultural products that speak to the identity of a group of people, a place, and a time. He has written numerous articles on America’s money, edited a conference volume (Almighty Dollar, 2008), and published four monographs, including The Greenback (2010) and, most recently, Americans for George (2015). www.narr.de ISBN 978-3-8233-8140-2 Alexander Onysko Eva-Maria Graf Werner Delanoy Guenther Sigott Nikola Dobri� (eds.) Onysko et al. (eds.) This volume, in honor of Allan James, collects a range of articles from different domains of English studies as a token of Allan James’s academic interests and his integrative approach to the field. The contributions in linguistics encompass a spectrum of topics including world Englishes, professional discourse, language acquisition, collocation, translation, and multilingualism. Cultural aspects in language teaching and in literary analysis enrich the reading and hint at Allan James’ Welsh and Celtic roots while also going beyond that. The Polyphony of English Studies A Festschrift for Allan James The Polyphony of English Studies Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik A Festschrift for Allan James