What language variation can tell us
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News
I will be attending ElsterCon in Leipzig September 27–29. I won’t be on any programming, but I’ll be around the con listening to the panels and generally being awkward (social anxiety + self-promotion + strangers is not a great combination). So if you’re on the right continent, come say hi!
I’m hoping to make it to more German/European cons next year, but there aren’t that many, and most of them are on the other side of the country. (Fun fact: Berlin is closer to Prague than to Frankfurt.) There are some anime cons close by, which could be fun (I am years behind on anime fandom, however), and I’ve always heard good things about Eastercon, which is in Belfast next year, but that will depend on the price of everything and the exchange rate with the pound. (All of it depends on whether my residence permit is renewed, of course.)
Synonymy: Is it real?
My sociolinguistics professor, Chad Howe, had a few things he tended to repeat because he felt strongly about them. One of them was “there is no such thing as true synonymy,” and, because he said it during a variationist sociolinguistics class, it didn’t take much explanation for most of us to go, “You know… that’s right.” (His other catchphrase, if you will, was “there is no such thing as free variation,” which requires a bit more explanation, and it will be touched on briefly toward the end.)
So I’m going to walk you through the explanation, and maybe by the end, you’ll agree.
What is a synonym? Merriam-Webster says it’s “one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses.” We learned about them in school, and when we’re stuck and can’t find the right word, we go to the thesaurus to find hopefully the right one.
But if you’ve ever used the thesaurus, you know you don’t just pick the top word on the list, right? You have to pick the right synonym for the context you’re using it in. This is one thing that makes instructors and professors suspect a student is plagiarizing: There are a lot of weird and infelicitous thesaurus substitutions. It is also extremely difficult for non-native speakers to navigate at times.
So if two words were truly 100% synonymous, there would be no infelicitous substitutions, because there would be absolutely no difference between couch, sofa, divan, chesterfield, day bed, banquette, and any of the other words that came up when I just searched the Merriam-Webster online thesaurus for “couch.” Yes, they are all things that more than one person can sit on, but a day bed and a love seat are different from each other and from a sofa.
Intangibles and connotations
With furniture and other tangible objects that are physically different in some definable manner, it’s more or less easy to say, “Yes, it’s true, those are not perfectly synonymous. That’s obvious!” But what about intangible objects and abstract ideas, like joy, happiness, elation, bliss, glee, euphoria, etc.? Those are all in the same emotion family, otherwise they wouldn’t be listed as synonyms, but they vary by degree. Euphoria is a stronger emotion than joy, which is itself stronger than happiness. I might express glee if someone gives me a really good gift or bliss if I ate a really good piece of cake, but neither of those is joy.
You can do this with other emotions, like sadness (distressed, distraught, devastated, upset) or anger (outrage, fury, rage), too, of course.
Then there’s the third type of imperfect synonymy: tone. There are a whole lot of terms for excrement (formal tone), including feces (also formal); poop, crap, dookie (informal); shit (vulgar); shiz (a minced form of the vulgar); doo-doo, poo-poo (childish); (solid) waste, mess (between formal and informal). Think about where you’d encounter feces or excrement (medical texts, formal journalism) versus poop or shit. My mom always told us to clean up the dog mess in the back yard, and she never approved of vulgar language (and, honestly, crap got a stern look). “I just stepped in dog poop” feels different than “I just stepped in dog shit.” To me, anyway. (Which is one reason variationism is so interesting.)
We’ve established, I hope, that synonyms are imperfect and should be thought of as approximations of each other, not one-for-one substitutes. Which, hopefully, you all already knew.
So now let’s talk about how linguists can show that words and even grammatical structures aren’t perfectly interchangeable and what that means.
Variationist sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics focuses on the ways language is used in society, and variationism is a branch of it where the research focuses on a particular word, phrase, morphological structure, way of pronunciation, syntactical structure, etc. The existence of computers allowed variationism to bloom, because, once large bodies of language data (corpora) were digitized, you could use software to search for all instances of whatever you’re looking for in a corpus and then do statistics on it. Imagine doing that by hand, line by line, copying down every time a particular verb form shows up in a book. Yeah, that would be a nightmare, right?
So people developed concordancers (fancy search tools) and programs that did multivariate analysis, then better concordancers and easier-to-use programs that did multivariate analysis (including a plugin for the stats program/language R), and you can have all sorts of fun poking around large bodies of text to see if things are correlated. (I’m loads of fun at parties.)
Sali Tagliamonte is one of the most prominent variationists of the first generation, and she wrote a book tracing the history of the field and the ways its theoretical perspectives changed in the ~50 years of its existence. (Sidebar: the study of variation in language goes further back than that; various German philologists in the 19th century characterized the German dialects, and there was a lot of dialectology in the US in the first half of the 20th century. There was also a French dude who bicycled around France to record regional dialects in the late 19th century. The application of variation to sociology, or of sociology to variation, is the new part. I will also note that one caption on the Atlas Obscura article has a typo of “Malburg” for “Marburg.” Incidentally, it was in Marburg that I took my first linguistics class and fell in love with it.)
Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith wrote a paper on the distribution of the complementizer that vs. the zero complementizer (“He said (that) he had to go”) in British dialects. (Unfortunately, the paper is not open access, and I hope the link works.) In generativist analyses, that and (zero) are said to be in “free variation,” which basically means that that can be there or not, and there’s no pattern to it or anything. Au contraire. If you actually look at extensive real-world data, like Tagliamonte and Smith did, you will find that the presence or absence of that actually follows a pattern (and that the absence of that has been steadily increasing in certain contexts since late Middle English).
To wit: If the main verb is think, say, or know, you are more likely not to use the complementizer than to use it, although know has about equal odds. If the subject of the main clause is I, you are more likely not to use the complementizer. There are a handful of other contexts they looked at where similar variations were also seen, but they take a bit more to explain. But it’s not free variation; the variation is constrained or conditioned by patterns that our brains have detected without us even noticing.
If I said, “He thinks he can come,” you might think it sounds more natural than “he thinks that he can come.” Or “I said I would do it” vs. “I said that I would do it.” This is something you probably never thought about before, but now, you’ll probably have a hard time not noticing it. (This is my life as a linguist, and you can bet that I looked at this entire essay for every instance of that. And maybe now you are, too.)
An article by Rika Ito and S. Tagliamonte (JSTOR) looks at intensifiers and how they change over time and how they cycle in and out of use, and it’s really interesting. An intensifier is an adverb like very or super or so that makes the word following it more of that. Very good, super fun, so hot, or if you’re from New England, wicked good.
Intensifiers are very susceptible to change; new ones are often created in youth language, and occasionally, they even stick around. Sometimes they get used in entirely new contexts, which is just so Gen X. But they’re also very sticky, so you’ll keep seeing very around, even while really starts to take over in speech. Ito & Tagliamonte found that people over 35 in their sample (taken from the York English Corpus, from 1998) rarely used really, while people under 35 rarely used very.
But, at the moment, very is the standard, basic variant that’s acceptable in formal writing, so it’s not likely to vanish in the next 30 years. In spoken English, there’s no way to predict what the trend will be. Back in the 80s and 90s, things were way cool; now, or sometime recently, they were mad cool. Way didn’t stick around as an intensifier, probably for the better. Will mad have any better luck? It’s anyone’s guess.
Another interesting factor they found was that the selection of very or really depended on what kind of thing it was modifying while also being different by age of the speaker. (Variationist linguistics lets you watch language change happen, and that is just so fucking cool.) The speakers under 35 were equally likely to say something was very or really old or young, far more likely to say something was very close, and far more likely to say something was really big. The speakers over 65 were more likely in all situations to use very than really, and the speakers between 35 and 65 still preferred very, but they were almost equally likely to say something was very or really big. (The original paper has some really nice graphs, and all you need to view them is a free JSTOR account.)
In conclusion
Words, even synonyms, aren’t perfectly interchangeable like cogs or widgets in a machine. The words we choose, or even the grammatical structures we choose, reflect a lot of patterns that we don’t even recognize, and these can be evidence of ongoing language change.
Media I have enjoyed
I occasionally remember that I’m paying for Apple TV and should use it, even if the new season of Severance isn’t out yet. An acquaintance mentioned that she liked The Morning Show, which I’d seen pop up on the Most Watched list a couple times but ignored because it looked so … normal? So on her recommendation, I decided to watch the first episode, then accidentally watched 2 more before going to bed. It’s about the people who make one of those morning TV news shows, a whole bunch of corporate politics, and the me-too movement. It’s also about sexism and racism and what journalism should do.
I’ve seen all of season 1 and the first episode of season 2, which was filmed in late 2020 or 2021. It’s occasionally bordering on the fantastic, in that giving an impassioned speech actually works and that sort of thing, but why shouldn’t Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon get a little wish fulfillment? I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I like it so far.
Until next time!
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