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Study of the Kashmiri - English mixed code shows
that in spite of the lack of structural overlap between V-2
Kashmiri and SVO English, the two languages are sometimes mixed
in a manner that seriously violates the equivalence constraint.
Once again we notice that the theoretical proposal fails to
illuminate the multilinguality of speakers. If one were looking
at the mixed code data with Alice in her wonderland, one would
say: |
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way
things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that
very few things indeed were really impossible. (Down the Rabbit-hole,
17). |
We thus notice that linguist's preoccupation
with idealized structural systems has not only kept her away
from the specificities of power and language relations in society
but has also restrained her from saying anything substantial
about fluid languages, i.e., about the ways in which people
construct their reality. The two things, I think, are closely
related. |
I think the only significant exceptions to what
I am trying to say are Hodge and Kress (1979), Fairclough (1992)
and Lee (1992). Yet in none of these, pain of the human condition
is at the centre. Nor I think these distinguished scholars fully
appreciate some non-negotiable aspect of the nature and structure
of language. Hodge and Kress (1979; 145-152) have a very illuminating
section as 'double think' in which they extremely insightfully
analyse excerpts from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution
in France and from the judgement of Mr. Justice Hardinge against
three men convicted of stealing 1 ½ guineas during food riots
in 1801 and try to show how negative forms must be interpreted
in terms of underlying positive forms and how these may betray
the anxieties of a changing social set-up. Fairclough's (1992)
work has had important theoretical and pedagogical implications
(see e.g. Janks 1993). He tried to show how discourse is shaped
by power relations, which in turn shapes society. In this situation,
as Bourdieu (1984) puts it, the bourgeoisie are positioned in
a relationship of ease and confident control, the petit bourgeoisie
in a relationship of anxiety. To quote Fairclough (1992:10): |
The
shaping of discourse by society and of society by discourse
are on the one hand long-term practice which progressively
restructure the sociolinguistic order (Fairclough 1989), but
on the other hand processes which affect every instance of
discourse. |
Lee's (1992) work on competing discourses regards
textual production as an exercise in power in which choices
made are not reflective of an objective reality but constitutive
of the discourse thus created. |
There are two serious problems with this otherwise
admirable tradition of work on the language-society interface.
Firstly, it is not predicated on a fully articulated vision
of society in which we have some idea, howsoever fuzzy, of the
redistribution of social political, economic and linguistic
resources. Secondly, it does not take into account those aspects
of the nature of language, which must be accorded autonomy that
is legitimately due to them. Irrespective of whether you are
a king or a pauper, your language is phonologically marked by
an alternation of consonantal and vocalic sounds consistently
avoiding their repetitive sequences, morphologically by a set
of word formation strategies and syntactically by a set of fairly
abstract principles often shared across the board. For several
years now, we have been working on English as a first, second
and foreign language and 'Error Analysis' has been one of our
major concerns. Not once for a sentence e.g. |
| The girl who is writing
a letter is my sister. |
any learner ever made a yes-no question e.g. |
| * Is the girl who writing
a letter is my sister? |
in which the first 'is' rather than the second
is fronted. Irrespective of the power structures embedded in
social discourse, speech of all the parties involved work in
terms of whole constituents rather than individual lexical items.
A sociolinguistic theory will be richer if it incorporates rather
than ignores that fact. I am not sure to what degree we can
agree with Hodge and Kress (1979; 204) when they say that all
the rules and norms that govern linguistic behaviour have a
social function, origin and meaning. Even if we largely agree
with this formulation we may have to invoke the theory of co-evolution
in which socially motivated phenomenon may get genetically coded
and may therefore, acquire a different status. And under no
circumstances can we ignore the multilinguality parameter. Even
if our focus is linguistic form alone, we may be better of looking
at multilingual rather than monolingual situations. As Singh
(2000:34) points out, a conceptually minimalist theory of linguistic
form may emerge 'from looking at matters of form in multilingual
contexts. It is rich enough to accommodate the Chomskian insight
that language is a unique window on Plato's problem and poor
enough to let the butterflies flutter away as and when they
please, appearing to display rich patterns our gardens, our
looking glasses project on to their wings, which do contain
the patterns in which these rich patterns find a reflection.
What is etched on their wings are archi-patterns, which are
like mirrors in which the ill-understood fact that no language
is an island finds a reflection.' |
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