23 Sociolinguistics Structures: Roman Jakobson, Levi Strauss

Mr. Jaipal

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In this chapter, we would be discussing Sociolinguistics with special reference to Roman Jakobson and Levi Strauss. As you may know, sociolinguistics is a branch of Linguistics. The knowledge of sociolinguistics will help us in our understanding of the communication system. It will also help us to use an appropriate structure for effective communication. We will focus on the historical overview of the evolution of sociolinguistics. The relation among language, society, social context, culture, ethnic group and kinship will be observed closely. There are many renowned linguists, philosophers and anthropologists who have contributed towards making sociolinguistics a subject of academic discipline. Here, we will focus on Roman Jakobson and Levi-Strauss. Let us begin with answering the question, what is sociolinguistics?

Introduction:

The general understanding of the term Sociolinguistics is that it is a branch of Linguistics. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. As you all know, language is a medium of human communication. There are plenty of languages in this world. A group of people live together in a community with a mutual acceptance and respect for their everyday life practices. Sociolinguistics studies language and its cultural and social aspects. The unique concentration is on the speech (oral communication) of human beings with various social identities such as community, beliefs, religious practices, age, gender, race, and class. It also studies the change in their speech when they are in a different social environment. Change in their speech will result in a different choice of words and phrases, a different selection of sentence structures, and the use of intonation while delivering sentences. Every individual is unique in her/his style of speaking at different social interactions.

Let us look at the historical overview of sociolinguistics. The scholars focused on the study of sociolinguistics as a distinguished area of language which had initiated in early years of 1960s. A majority of linguists also acknowledged that the study of linguistics began in ancient India. The ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini had studied the stylistic preferences among the varieties as the characteristics of any living language. He had also worked on grammatical rules of Sanskrit language. Therefore, Panini is recognized as a pioneer of sociolinguistics. He is known for his text Ashtadhyayi.

Modern sociolinguistics has been shaped by the influence of four western traditions namely, historical and comparative linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. American structuralists realized the necessity of describing endangered American Indian languages before they die. Out of this motivation, scholars such as Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir and Franz Boas came forward to establish a platform to study culture, cognition and language. The study of anthropological perspective on language, could be regarded as a forerunner to other branches of sociolinguistics. It has been acknowledged that the term sociolinguistics was used for the first time by Haver Currie in 1952. Haver Currie is a philosopher and a poet who focused on the absence of social consideration in linguistic research.

Language Variation:

There are a variety of languages which can be called as socio-class dialects or sociolects. Based on speaker’s social background, grammatical differences among the speakers of a language are also possible. The socio-class accents can exist due to internal differentiations of human societies such as different social groups. Let us take an example, the word ‘school’ is pronounced as /skuːl/ but a group of people in the society pronounce the same word as /Iskuːl/, similarly, the word ‘first’ has been pronounced as /fərst/ whereas it has to be pronounced as /fəːst/. Even in standard English, regional differences can exist. The differences will exist in terms of vocabulary items and grammatical rules. If we look at parts of England, such as Midlands of England and south part of England, they are quite opposite.

Midlands: You need your hair cutting.

South: You need your hair cut.

British English meaning of the word lift has been represented by American English word elevator.

British: She has got

American: She has gotten

Scottish: That needs washed

Language and Ethnic Group:

The other aspect of socio-linguistic study concentrates on the influence of social living environment and its result on the spoken form of the language. Spoken language of a particular group of people may change with the influence of the surrounding environment. Irrespective of the established language structures in human mind and practice of language over a period of time, the spoken form of people will signify the variation. The American linguist William Labov’s New York study can be a good example here. His study explains the significant difference in English pronunciation spoken by Italian and Jewish background people living in New York. The difference in pronunciation is significant due to the formation of various ethnic group communities within the city. The interference of established language structures and long practice of grammatical rules may not let the speaker re-register the new language structures and grammatical rules.

Language and Context:

Social context can also influence the change in using the linguistic patterns of a language. An individual speaker of a particular language uses various linguistic structures and phrases in accordance with the speaker’s social context. Needless to say, every human being has to adopt many social roles to perform day-to-day activities. They need to act according to selective linguistic structures and forms, in order to perform expected social role successfully in their respective context. For instance, a boy in the classroom has to perform a role of a disciplined student and simultaneously has to adopt the role of a good friend to his classmates. The same boy when goes back home may adopt the role of naughty boy with his beloved family members. They are three different contexts but the same boy has to perform. Therefore, the boy is self- motivated to select from a variety of linguistic structures, choice of vocabulary items and intonation to be a successful communicator. The boy uses many emotional structures, words and phrases as a lovely son with his parents. He uses as many words and sentences as possible to express his obedience, punctuality and discipline in the academic context. He also uses the words and structures to show his love, concern and affection to his friends. Hence, the social context can also influence the change in a language. Speaker will change their pronunciation when there is a shift from formal context to informal context. The people’s social status can have an impact on the change in language. If the two individuals of equal social status participate in an interaction, it would not be the same as when an individual of high social rank interacts with a subordinate in social rank.

Language and Society:

In the linguistic history and language, it would not be possible to find any language which is not influenced or determined by: regional and/ or social distribution, its relationship with speakers and listeners, thought process, events and ideas in the practical society. This is one of the reasons for linguists to find Chomsky’s view of language theory to be sterile, though it explicitly rejects any concern for the relationship between a language and its users. According to Hudson (1996) language is a set of linguistic items. Entities like speech sounds, words and grammatical structures, are dealt with by language theorists such as Chomsky and others. On the other side, a society’s structure and people living together has been analyzed by social theorists. In order to understand the structure of social institutions and its functions, these social theorists make use of concepts like status, power, politeness, solidarity, identity, face, accommodation, politeness, and gender.

Certain studies show the difficulties of defining linguistic items such as speech sounds, syllables, words, and sentences. On the other hand, defining social concepts such as solidarity, identity, social class, politeness and face is very difficult, for which an individual may come up with his/her unique way of understanding. It may not be possible to correlate the two within the theory because language and societies are prone to constant change. There are still a few relationships which exist between language and society. They determine or influence one another. If we look at certain examples, teenagers use a certain kind of language, children at times use a certain type of linguistic items which are not used by adults. It can be understood from certain studies that language used by speakers reflects their gender and even their regional, ethnic and social origin. It is also shown by a few other studies that the ways of speaking, choice of words, conversing values are determined by one’s social environment.

Language and Social Interaction:

Language and Context:

Language and Society:

Language and Social Interaction:

We have discussed how language changes in relation to context, ethnic group, and social class. Now, we will learn about social interaction and the significant role it plays in influencing and bringing about change in language usage. Howard Giles, a Social Psychologist of Language, pointed out that speakers of any language are not sociolinguistic automata. According to Howard Giles, speakers do not respond automatically to situations and can use switching for their personal purposes.

There are two ways to do the above. First is by using two languages at a time. It can be seen in the following situations e.g. a Telugu mother tongue speaker while speaking in English is switching to his/her mother tongue too during the conversation. It can also be done in another way for instance, a Malayalam speaker can switch to English while speaking in Malayalam. It is a very natural phenomenon which happens in India since English holds the position of a link language. Code switching and Code mixing happens very often at higher educational institutions such as central universities, IITs, NITs and Central research centers.

The second possible way could be, switching from one language to another completely. David Parkin gives his own example of Uganda for code switching (switching from one language to another completely). Language switching takes place very often in everyday casual conversation. It takes place according to the situation because it is a multilingual country. The capital city of Uganda is Kampala. The city Kampala is known for multilingual social environment. People with a different mother tongue and from diverse ethnic groups live together. Nilo-Hamitic and Arabic language are used for communication. One of the important objectives of sociolinguistics is to study the various possible ways in which language can be used in oral communication. The study of the above-mentioned example reveals that relationships can be manipulated to achieve specific goals by using language in different ways. There are a few points where a speaker can be interrupted in the conversation structure since it is not possible to interrupt a speaker all the time. Situations of this kind can be observed while children come into the picture. Children interrupt conversations taking place between two people abruptly. It also believed that there are rules governing when one can initiate a new topic for discussion. Maintaining silence in between a conversation also has its own significance. I hope that you might have heard of utterances like “I am sorry to interrupt” and “Excuse me I have a point to mention here”. These kinds of expressions show one’s acknowledgement for breaking the rule.

Theory of Structuralism:

The concept of structuralism took its academic shape with the efforts of a group of eminent scholars namely, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida. All these thinkers had their own individual thoughts, which were different from each other but the central theme among their work was that of structuralism. They also had some common slogans such as “the death of subject”, “the assault on realism” and a clearly defined doctrine.

Levi-Strauss was a source of guidance for other structuralists to resolve the confusion that existed between human and social sciences. He redefined the human sciences object and made it possible to study human institutions on scientific foundations.

Levi-Strauss:

Levi-Strauss was born in Brussel to a French Jewish Couple. He spent all his childhood in Paris. He studied Law and Philosophy in Paris and worked for a couple of years as a secondary school teacher. He was appointed as a member of cultural commission to Brazil and visited many universities and institutions as a visiting Professor. Levi-Strauss and his wife Dina Dreyfus worked together on anthropology in Brazil during 1935-39. His wife Dina was a Professor of Ethnography.

Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist who contributed immensely towards the theory of structuralism. Levi-Strauss was honored by the Chair of Social Anthropology at College de France. He was also honored by many other universities and institutions throughout the world. He is also known as the Father of Modern Anthropology. Levi-Strauss argued that a civilized mind and savage mind have the same structure. He also believed that human characteristics are not different. The famous work of Levi-Strauss is Tristes Tropiques. His thoughts and observations culminated into this book. He emerged as an important source of knowledge in the school of structuralism by writing Tristes Tropiques. His ideas were adopted in various fields like that of sociology, philosophy and humanities.

A very significant contribution of Levi-Strauss was his idea of Structural Anthropology. Strauss was the first among the structuralists to analyze the characterization of relationships in a sentence. He was the first to write about the ability of social science to formulate relationships. Strauss also had respect for Law and had mentioned that Law is always applicable under all the circumstances. He talks about scientific analysis as real, simplified, illustrative, and a simple presentation from all the complex data. It must also assure the correct predictions of actual situations. He explained blood relationships by adopting structural linguistics.

Kinship Relations:

In 1930s, A.R. Raddifle-Brown talked about the First order Relationships. He believed that the elementary family is a unit of structure and all human relationships exist from this unit. Brown explains that there are three kinds of human relationships: that which exists between parent and child, between two siblings, and between a wife and a husband. Levi- Strauss did not agree with Brown and his idea to limit the existence of human relationships to elementary family as a unit. The elementary unit of kinship is explained by Strauss like a social organization since there are many attitudes and behaviors. In order to support his views about the kinship, he gives the example of the relationship between father and his son in Melanesia Islands. He also mentions about the unfriendly relationship between father and his son, on the other hand, the relationship between an uncle and his nephew. I quote here “It is not the families (isolated terms) which are truly ‘elementary,’ but, rather, the relations between those terms.” Levi-Strauss discussed the relationship between an uncle and his nephew. He believed that the relationship between an uncle and his nephew is the key to the most elementary structure of kinship. It also helps to understand social organization which is governed by kinship.

One of the discoveries of Levi–Strauss’s was Attitude. It can be understood by observing the relationships between, two siblings, wife and husband, and nephew and uncle. It has already been stated that uncle and nephew’s relationship was the key to understand the elementary unit of kinship with respect to all the social organizations. The kinship’s elementary unit depends on the terms: father, son, sister and brother. The element of Attitude was often neglected as an unimportant term in relation to the psychological point of view. It can be understood as a phase of transition or change. It is a natural phenomenon to see change in children’s behavior which seems too hard at times for parents to accept. “If a boy is antagonistic towards his father perhaps it is a phase he is going through or something. Anyway children are always like that, it is their response to authority. They’ll grow out of it when they become fathers and start tormenting their own sons. This is partly because attitudes so often flare up as a result of non-institutionalised, diffuse psychological factors. However, once these are discounted then one finds that attitude plays a fundamental role in the most elementary of institutional structures–the kinship relation” (Phillips, John) (http://www.angelfire.com/de/jwp/anthropology.html). In the initial stage of structuralism, this was said to be a major breakthrough for structuralism. Levi-Strauss’s move towards the structural analysis of myth was another significant gesture. Here it can be observed that he adapted the structural method as well as acted upon the strength of his own findings about kinship.

Roman Jakobson:

Roman Jakobson was a Russian American linguist. Ferdinand de Saussure’s work had an impact on Roman Jakobson’s thought process. He had become an eminent scholar of the Structural Analysis of Language in the Twentieth century. Jakobson became a focal figure among other linguists to think beyond linguistics and to adopt structural analysis. The concept of structuralism has evolved from the Saussurean Methods. They also became a part of the Intellectual Movements in Europe and the United States.

Jakobson’s Parallelism is one of his important contributions. Parallelism, for Jakobson was believed to be invariant verbal poetry structure. Jakobson defined the term Parallelism in his own technical words: Parallelism results in principles of equivalent projecting, in axis of selection into the axis of combination. It means poet selects from the paradigmatic axis, the items that are contrastive and projects them onto syntagmatic axis in regular fashion. Jakobson gives Shakespeare’s 129 sonnet as an example to parallelism. He describes that the poet selects word pairs to be phonemes (equivalent in sound) as well as semantic (equivalent in meaning) categories e.g. blame and shame. Roman Jakobson was inspired from Karl Buhler’s Organon- Model to write his own six language communication functions. Jakobson’s six language communication function, will help us understand, the verbal communication effective functioning. The Six language functions are mentioned below.

1. The Referential Function:

The first function of a language is referential function. It correlates to the factor in Context and illustrates a situation, object or mental state. The referential function’s descriptive statements can consist of two: deictic words, and definite descriptions. e.g. “The autumn leaves have all fallen now.”

2. The Poetic Function:

The second communication function of a language is poetic function. The poetic communication function of a language imports on the message for self reference (the code itself, and how it is used). It also focuses on operative function in poetry and at the same time, slogans too.

3. The Emotive Function:

The third communication function of a language is, namely, emotive function, also can be called as expressive or affective. This particular function connects to the sender (addresser). It can be best exemplified by interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance but do add information about the sender’s (speaker’s) internal state. e. g. “Wow, what a view!”

4. The Cognitive Function:

The cognitive communication function of a language is the fourth function defined by the Jakobson. The fourth function concentrates directly on the information receiver (addressee). This function can be described by vocatives and imperatives.

e.g. “Tom! Come inside and eat!”

5. The Phatic Function:

Jakobson’s fifth function is phatic function. This particular function highlights language communication function for the sake of interaction. It is also associated with the channel factor. This particular (Phatic) function could be observed in the utterances of greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers. It also plays a key role to maintain, close, open and to cross-check the communication channel.

e.g. “Hello?”, “Ok?”, “Hummm”, “Bye”

6. The Meta-Lingual Function:

The sixth and the last communication function of language is meta-lingual function. It can also be called as meta-linguistic or reflexive function. Jakobson calls it as a code to discuss or describe itself.

Conclusion:

The study of Sociolinguistics immensely contributed towards the development and also advanced research in Linguistics. We can understand that language is not merely a means of communication, but also brings in the social aspect of a particular community and its people with cultural ingredients which are fine-tuned with psychological aspects of human beings. The sentence structures and words are only a physical representation of information, which carries in itself all the unseen emotional feelings, and intensions. In this scenario, sociolinguists play an undeniable role in the process of developing structures, to express and understand human feelings, thoughts, and knowledge in a better way.

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References:

Holenstain. (1976). Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language, Indian University Press.
Jakobson R., (1959). The Notion of Grammatical Meaning According to Boas. American Anthropologist, Memoir- 89.
Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Phillips, John. http://www.angelfire.com/de/jwp/anthropology.htm.
Robinson, W. P. (1972). Language and Social Behaviour. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge University Press.
Sebba, M. (1993). London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. London: Longman. Smith, P. (1985). Language, the Sexes and Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
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