As the last issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics (BJL), this volume delves into linguistic ideologies. Language usage and the evaluations we make about it are intricately intertwined: even in the absence of visual cues of the speaker or writer, we intuitively develop perceptions about the sociolinguistic context of our interlocutor. The language employed often offers subtle hints about their age, gender, or social and regional origins. Particularly in spoken discourse, we find ourselves assessing not just their accent, but also forming impressions about the individual’s likability, perceived arrogance or intelligence, and various other attributes. Similar to its predecessors spanning 36 volumes, the content of this ultimate issue of the BJL is diverse, encompassing historical sources that shed light on language ideologies of bygone eras, insights from the language classroom, and perspectives from everyday language users.
Abstract This paper delves into language differentiation in the 16th and 17th-century Low Countries, focusing on how vernacular languages were labeled and framed in grammatical descriptions. We examine both monolingual grammars as well as grammatical descriptions in multilingual textbooks for foreign language learners. By comparing these two corpora, we gain insights into the differences between monolingual and multilingual approaches to language differentiation and uncover language ideologies that shaped the Language-Making process during this early stage of standard languages. An example of language differentiation is the evolving relation between ‘Dutch’ and ‘German’. In the monolingual grammars, Dutch is explicitly positioned along the lines of an ‘ours’ versus a ‘theirs’, but what is considered ‘ours’ differs between the grammars and changes over time. In the multilingual textbooks, the direct juxtaposition between Dutch and German on the title page leads to distinct labels (‘Nederduits’ vs. ‘Hoogduits’) whereas there is no consistent distinction in the body of these textbooks until the late 17th century. Overall, we conclude that a ‘Dutch language’ was certainly being ‘made’ during this period, in name and in reference to other vernacular languages. However, its boundaries were still fuzzy, reflecting the multilingual reality of the early modern Low Countries.
Abstract With the possibility to enroll in courses in nineteen different languages, the free university of Brussels (ULB) has opted for a linguistic offer that reflects the city’s highly multilingual character. In the faculty of languages and literature, students interact in and with multiple languages on a daily basis. In a study which interrogated these students on their linguistic representations, representations related to prestige were shown to be an important part of the collected responses. This paper aims to provide an overview of the different manifestations and interpretations of the ‘language of prestige’ linguistic representation in this sample of participants regarding the languages taught at the faculty. It also explores various implications that this representation has for language learning, as well as questions raised by the possible interpretative bias of the researcher trying to observe and study linguistic representations. In addition, this paper written in English relating research conducted in French addresses the issue of ‘epistemological translation’ and the challenges it poses.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jesuit priest Joseph Deharveng (1867–1929) was one of the main representatives of a language correction movement based essentially on the standard Parisian model of French. Deharveng’s goal was to clear the practices of French-speaking Belgians of everything which seemed to deviate from this supposed ‘good usage’ of French. Under the evocative title Corrigeons-nous!, Deharveng published six anthologies from 1922 to 1928 reproducing the articles published in his language column “Récréation philologique et grammaticale” in the Brussels newspaper La Jeunesse. The present study addresses how Deharveng makes use of evidential markers, that is, linguistic features to express the sources of knowledge in his language column. The distribution of evidential markers in Deharveng’s column is compared to those in two other Franco-Belgian language columns published by Albert Doppagne (1912–2003) from 1960 to 1987 in the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and by Michel Francard (1952–) from 2018 to 2022, also in Le Soir. The aim of this comparison is to discern author-specific and language ideology-driven similarities and differences in the patterning of evidential strategies in language columns.
Language teaching practice is known to come with more or less implicit views on what ‘good pronunciation’ sounds like. However, over the past decades, frameworks such as the communicative approach to language learning and the wish for social inclusion have led to a gradual shift in normative thinking, with intelligibility becoming increasingly valued over the acquisition of a native-like accent, especially at lower levels of proficiency. This contribution traces the evolution of pronunciation norms, ideologies and teaching practices for French and English. We zoom in on the past 150 years, a period in which the relative importance of English and French in international communication was gradually reversed and foreign language learning became a school subject, readily accessible to all pupils. We will supplement our historical overview by an exploratory investigation of current foreign MA foreign language teacher trainees’ experiences and attitudes. While a near-native accent is still seen as a sign of academic success for language students, this new generation of language professionals is very much aware of the fact that pupils who start learning languages in secondary school should first and foremost be sensitized to the target language pronunciation in a safe environment, with feasible and communicatively-relevant norms.
Abstract Despite the inclusive nature of recent educational reforms in French-speaking Belgium, few teachers implement multilingual approaches in their classrooms. On the contrary, the education system perpetuates a monolingual doxa by ignoring the home languages of newcomer or immigrant pupils, or even by prohibiting the use of these languages in school. We propose a discursive analysis of some ‘circulating’ doxic ideas (Charaudeau 1997; Paveau 1999) in the school environment: multilingualism is often associated with images of mixing, confusion or degeneration; didactic gestures are based on stereotyped student figures (so-called ‘vulnerable’, ‘eager’ students) which reproduce a homogeneous and (de)classifying discourse; the deficient vision of the pupils’ language skills serves the argumentation in a doxic causality where the explanation of cause (such as the pupils’ bilingualism) to effect (their poor school performance) is based on authoritative discourses with evidential value. The data analyzed are based on semi-structured interviews and informal exchanges with secondary school teachers in French-speaking Belgium.
This paper examines the relationships between information structure and prosody in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language), focusing on the marking of contrast. A recurrent assertion in the literature is that contrast is always marked by prosodic prominence. We discuss this interaction at the manual level by investigating the connections between the presence or absence of a manual prosodic marker and the contrastive or non-contrastive character of a sign. To explore this connection, we examine data related to the holds, dominance reversals, repetitions, and variations in duration and displacement produced on 977 signs by four native LSFB signers. We also assign a certain degree of prominence to every sign depending on the number of cues employed by a participant. Data are analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Chi-squared test, Mann-Whitney U test, or Kruskal-Wallis test). The results show that contrast has its own prosodic marking at the manual level in LSFB and that contrastive signs are more prominent than non-contrastive ones. The prevailing cues used to encode contrast are variations in displacement or relative duration, and combinations of relative duration and displacement. The interactions between prosody, information structure, and articulatory constraints are discussed to explain the different patterns highlighted in the data sample.
Task-based exchanges are known to have multiple co-occurring interactive structures that prompt interlocutors to integrate various semiotic fields ( Goodwin 2000 ). In addition to underlying norms of cooperative interaction, task-based exchanges include joint accomplishment of some activity. In this study, a group of co-workers (two hearing and one deaf) engaged in a team-building exercise where they jointly constructed a container fit for protecting an egg. They communicated, in part, via a sign language interpreter. Clark’s (2016) methods of communication were applied to the interpreter-mediated interaction (IMI) to determine whether certain semiotic modes were more (or less) accessible to the respective linguistic groups. Micro-analysis of three activity phases revealed moments when the participants responded to and integrated semiotic fields displayed in front of them. While not all content was accessible, like the complex depictive structures produced by the deaf person, some instances of mutual understanding without interpretation were achieved via integration of meaningful components of visibly accessible semiotic fields. Results challenge traditional views of IMIs where interpreters are positioned as channelling communicative content exclusively through them.
This paper presents a study of four recurrent gestures: sweeping away, holding away, brushing away and throwing away. These forms have so far only been studied for spoken languages and are said to form the ‘family of Away gestures’, which is semantically motivated by the effect of actions of removing or keeping away of things. Our corpus-based study aims to investigate these forms in four sign languages: Catalan, French Belgian, German, and Polish. We select and study a data sample that lasts approximately three hours. Our findings reveal the frequency, functions, and the lexicalisation status of the forms across the four studied languages.
Abstract A large body of research has highlighted the tight, carefully organised temporal coordination of interaction. When taking turns, people tend to minimise the occurrence of gaps and overlaps (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Within the field of signed language linguistics, however, there is an ongoing debate: while some researchers claim that signers orient to a ‘one-speaker-at-a-time’ principle (McCleary and Leite 2013) as found in spoken conversation, others argue that signed language interactions allow for more overlapping turns, displaying a more collaborative floor in their turn-taking mechanics (Coates and Sutton-Spence 2001). The current paper aims at contributing to this discussion by providing a first cross-linguistic, systematic account of the manifestation of overlap in two signed languages, namely LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language) and VGT (Flemish Sign Language). We analysed simultaneous signing in 2 hours of dyadic face-to-face conversations. This paper combines a quantitative account of the turn timing and thus frequency counts of overlap in VGT and LSFB interactions with a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the interactional, i.e., sequential environment, in which overlap occurs and the strategies deployed to accomplish overlap resolution by deaf participants. In doing so, this paper sheds further light on the orderliness of signed conversation, and ultimately contributes to a better understanding of the semiotic complexity of multimodal interaction management across language ecologies (Ferrara and Hodge 2018).
Language is complex in many respects. When conceived as a system that is to be analysed at all levels of linguistic structure, it is interpreted as a static and abstract phenomenon in which the rules are disconnected from their context of use. However, the ability to do language, construed as a fundamentally social practice grounded in our in situ face-to-face interactions, does not exclusively rely on knowing the rules that govern the grammatical principles in a given language, nor does it limit itself to understanding the lexical content of utterances. Language is more than that; it is fundamentally social and inherently multimodal in that it enables all humans to create, express, and construe meaningful utterances through their bodies. For a long time, however, linguistic theories have neglected to consider the diverse and rich ways humans do language using their bodies. In this introduction, particular attention is paid to the different roles the body plays across a range of distinct sign languages and contexts. In that respect, a short historical detour into the evolutive stages of sign language research is provided first. Next, the aims and the different contributions of this volume are outlined. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.
Reformulation involves saying something again in a different way. Because of its metalinguistic nature ( Rabatel 2017 ), combined with its general aim of clarifying the utterance, we propose to consider the act of reformulation as offering a window to the way interlocutors process and adjust themselves and their utterances in their social language practices. More specifically, this study proposes a set of four analytical criteria to characterize interlocutors’ investment in discourse and interaction via the observation of their use of reformulations. These criteria concern the frequency of reformulations within a production, the proportion of self- and other-reformulations ( Güllich and Kotschi 1987 ), the type of adjustment that the act of reformulation seeks to achieve ( Authier-Revuz 1995 ) and the type of semiotic strategies used, namely descriptive, indicative and depictive ways of meaning making ( Clark 1996 ; Ferrara and Hodge 2018 ). The paper draws on the exploratory analysis of the productions of deaf LSFB signers extracted from the LSFB Corpus. It illustrates how describing the reformulations according to the proposed criteria, reveals distinctions between different patterns of pragmatic attitude and involvement in discourse and interaction. This approach opens new avenues for the pragmatic descriptions of LSFB and signed discourses in general.
Abstract Enactment is a frequent depictive strategy used to denote referents. Its referential functions are increasingly well-documented cross-linguistically, notably in sign languages. A lesser-known function of enactment is that of stance expression. By enacting a referent, language users can also convey their own perspective and comment on the enacted individual. In this article, it is argued that the depictive manipulation of the French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) lexical sign ls, which refers to the action of signing, is a fruitful area of investigation for the study of social meanings conveyed by means of enactment. The observation of elicited dyadic conversations about language attitudes shows that LSFB signers can mold several formational aspects of the sign ls in a variety of ways by means of enactment, providing a near first-hand experience of – and commenting on – diverse signers and their signing styles.
Abstract In this contribution, we offer a first exploration of stance expressions in Flemish Sign Language (VGT). Biber and Finegan (1989) define stance as the expression of feelings, attitudes, judgments, commitments, and assessments. The few studies focusing on stance in signed languages have shown that stance can be expressed by various structures and mechanisms such as lexical signs, manual gestures (e.g., Palm Up gestures) and embodiment/mental space blends. We will examine if these findings apply to Flemish Sign Language, and we will identify other means of expressing stance in VGT. In this exploratory study, we focus on the following questions: (1) which articulators and semiotic resources can be used in Flemish Sign Language to express stance?; and (2) How are visible bodily actions through different articulators integrated temporally in stance expressions? Our study is based on the analysis of about five hours of data from the Corpus Flemish Sign Language. We present examples from our dataset to illustrate that stance can be expressed through a range of structures and mechanisms (such as lexical signs, manual gestures, enactment, and non-manual features), expressed either sequentially or simultaneously by a multitude of articulators. Moreover, we zoom in on the phenomenon of stance-stacking and analyse how multiple stance expressions can be combined in VGT.
The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us to the question how this construction with different morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic characteristics in the input languages is governed in Spanish-English bilingual and codeswitching speech. Through the analysis of a dataset of diminutive constructions extracted from the Bangor Miami corpus, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how one and the same construction differently represented in the input languages is administered in bilingual contexts. As this is a first approach to studying diminutives in codeswitching, three well known structural codeswitching models serve as a primary theoretical tool against which the diminutive is tested. These are Poplack’s (1980) Universal Constraints, Myers-Scotton’s (2002) Matrix Language Frame Model, and Blom and Gumperz’ (1972) Metaphorical Codeswitching Framework. The results show that Miami bilinguals prefer the prototypical markers of each language, - ito and little (e.g. un partimecito, un little estante ). Furthermore, while the data largely confirm Poplack’s Constraints, they refute our hypothesis based on Myers-Scotton’s MLF model. Regarding Gumperz’ theory, the use of diminutive markers in a particular language correlates with a certain meaning the speaker wants to communicate (i.e. quantitative or qualitative), which again provides support to the framework.
The present article focuses on semantic-pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors explaining the use of non-French words and constructions in the exolingual communicative context of French exams. On the basis of an oral and written exam corpus, this article looks into different types of cross-linguistic interactions to question the boundaries of codeswitching (CS) and propose a prototypical approach. Special attention is given to the correlations between the embedded languages (in this case, English or Dutch) and the type of influence these languages have on the participants’ French discourse. By taking into account the distribution of cross-linguistic interactions in the discourse of different groups of participants divided according to the levels of the European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR 2001), this study shows that, even if lower level participants resort to other languages to compensate for lexical deficiencies in French, they also choose to resort to non-French lexemes due to semantic and sociolinguistic factors, as is the case for advanced level speakers. From the perspective of language assessment, the notion of lexical error is central. Based on a typology of embedded units, this study aims at identifying the factors of acceptability of different types of transcodic marks.
AbstractViewed from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, this research addresses multilingual codeswitching practices of youngsters with North African roots from the super-diverse Flemish city of Ghent. Particular attention is paid here to their artistic – mainly interethnic – performances, as these play a vital role in constructing ethnic and social belonging by voicing “glocal” identities. In so doing, the study provides evidence of the importance of multilingualism and codeswitching in the accommodation, socialization, and emancipation of these youngsters.
AbstractGrammatical gender has been thoroughly investigated in codeswitching (CS) research. When (only) one of the languages involved in CS has grammatical gender, it has repeatedly been shown that (simultaneous) bilinguals assign default gender to a codeswitched noun from a genderless language (Liceras et al. 2008;Valdés Kroff et al. 2017;Parafita Couto 2019). For Spanish, “[t]here is little doubt that masculine is the unmarked or default gender” (Harris, 1991, 43). When looking at Belgian Dutch however, the picture is a bit more complicated, as it is not clear which determiner is unmarked for gender.Rooryck (2003)argues that the neuter gender is the under-specified category, while the masculine and feminine are marked for gender. This would predict that English nouns would be preceded by a neuter determiner when incorporated in a Belgian Dutch sentence. However, it seems to be the case that masculine, rather than neuter, is the preferred determiner for English codeswitches into Dutch. This paper reports on an acceptability judgment task in which simultaneous bilinguals were asked to rate (Belgian) Dutch sentences containing an English noun on a 7 point scale. Results surprisingly show a preference for feminine gender, in addition to neuter being dispreferred. I speculate that this unexpected result is due to influence from Standard Dutch.
