Research Papers
By Peter L.
Patrick
University of Essex
Some of the papers which
may appear on this page have been published in one version or another, others
have not. All of them are my intellectual property. Feel free to read them and
send me your comments. If a version of one has been published elsewhere, please
cite the original publication and credit the publishers; if it has not appeared
yet, please do me the courtesy of contacting me before you cite it in print, as
I may be revising it. In either case, please respect the rights of the author
(me) and publishers (if any).
Individuals
with varying types of language expertise – linguists with academic credentials,
interpreters with different levels of qualification, native speakers with few
or no academic qualifications – are increasingly involved in the determination of national, regional or ethnic origins of
refugees as part of the asylum process. There is considerable controversy over
the role, if any, that language experts and linguistic expertise should play in
LADO (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origins), and each host nation
differs in its practices. Attempts to draw up a minimum set of standards
(Language and National Origin Group, 2004, link) - widely endorsed by
linguists - have been both referred to and contested in legal proceedings. In
this seminar at Cambridge University (CamLing VI;
earlier versions given at University of Westminster; SOAS; Lausanne Workshop on
Linguistic Analyses within the Asylum Procedure, and elsewhere), I explain and
define key issues and developments. I contextualize LADO within language and
human rights; describe the institutional pressures and context of LADO;
contrast assumptions common in LADO with forensic linguistics, where the
idiolect is a key concept, and those common in speech community studies;
describe how LADO is conducted in the UK and what is wrong with the process;
compare the sociolinguistic research base to the (currently deficient) research
base utilized in LADO, and call for research to develop the latter and inform
the establishment of expertise in the field.
A recent seminar at Edge
Hill University (Feb 2012; earlier version given at Bayreuth University,
ASNEL/GNEL) theorises the speech community at more
length and contrasts the national order, dynamic and ‘enlightened’ speech
community models.
This plenary address to the
International Association of Forensic Linguistics 10th Biennial conference at
Aston University (July 2011) takes apart a sample LADO report from the UK
process, identifies four fundamental problems in LADO, and concludes with a
review of progress since 2004 and a LADO wish-list.
For more information on LADO, please see the Language and Asylum Research Group (LARG) webpage.
This paper analyzes variation in the marking of number on plural nouns in
mesolectal Jamaican Patwa
(JP) in typological perspective. Number marking is one of only three variable
features for which sufficient comparable quantitative
data exist from Creole and African American
English speech communities (Rickford 2006). Earlier theoretical claims
for grammatical and functional principles to constrain variation in JP, and
English-related Creoles generally (Bickerton 1975, Dijkhoff 1983, Mufwene 1986), are
tested and found wanting. Many previous empirical studies lacked a valid,
sufficiently nuanced taxonomy of surface forms which can reliably map onto the
level of reference, and permit reorganization at a more abstract level capable
of allowing generalizations. Quantitative
analysis considers the choice between plural –z and non-marking on regular nouns (with possible co-occurrence of
overt marker –dem
included as an independent variable) in light of the major claimed linguistic
constraints – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and phonological. Results are
compared with other contemporary English-lexicon Creoles, African American
Vernacular English (AAVE, eg Rowe 2005), and African
American Diaspora varieties (eg Singler 2007). Two
corpora are first analysed separately, then combined to form the largest
database yet studied for number-marking in any single Creole, African American
Diaspora, or African American Vernacular English-speaking community. Results
show that number-marking with –z/zero
variation is a robust part of JP grammar, operating according
to a system that is markedly different from the redundant agreement of English,
yet consistent across a wide spectrum of speakers. Moreover, the data contradict
the various ‘Creole patterns’ put forth in the literature, and used as a basis
for historical conclusions concerning AAVE and
Creole genesis. Number marking clearly does not
follow earlier accounts constraining it by referentiality
of the NP. Neither is it a functional response by speakers to ease listeners’
comprehension task (cf. James 2001), and the ‘local disambiguation’ pattern
(argued to be “quintessentially creole” by e.g.
Poplack, Tagliamonte, & Eze
2000) does not hold of any of the varieties compared. Finally, this paper
characterizes contrasts in levels of redundant marking across the JP Creole
continuum, arguing that the same constraints hold for all speakers and
illustrating the rise of systematic redundant marking across the speech community,
thus shedding light on the nature of agreement in Atlantic Creole continua. (This powerpoint
version was presented at a Stockholm
University seminar in
March 2009, and at the Eighth Creolistics Workshop in
Giessen, April
2009.)
Pidgins, Creoles and Variation
This draft version of a chapter appeared in The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies, edited by Silvia
Kouwenberg and John V. Singler (2008, Blackwell: 461-487). In it, I argue that an
understanding of linguistic variation underlies fundamental concepts in the
field of P/Cs; distinguish 3 commonly-understood senses of ‘variation’, and
their associated assumptions and understandings; outline the Labovian variationist framework
and its contributions to P/C studies; consider the functions of variation in
language, and specifically in P/Cs; explore what it means to claim that P/Cs
exhibit “more variation” than older languages, and evaluate the claim; review
the applications of variationist analyses to a range
of Atlantic Creole speech communities and linguistic features; and, finally,
argue that inherent variation in P/Cs and their input languages is not
eliminated in the competition of forms and grammars that accompanies creolization, but is instead constrained to serve other
functions than the purely communicative.
Change in /ai/
and /oi/ among Barbadians in South East
England (with Michelle Straw)
The last in a series of
papers co-authored with Michelle Straw
in which we examine patterns of dialect retention, change and assimilation
among three generations of Barbadian immigrants and their descendants in Ipswich, Suffolk.
(This 2005 NWAV paper stems from Straw’s PhD thesis, which was completed 2006.)
This paper takes acoustic measures (F1, F2) of the nuclei of front upgliding diphthongs in price
and choice lexical sets for 24
speakers, evenly divided between Barbadian and Anglo heritage, male and female,
and 3 age groups, as well as 8 other reference vowels. We find evidence for
neither divergent changes nor retention of Creole structures, but rather that
the Barbadian-descent speakers make fundamental alterations in vowel structure
across three generations, targeting local Ipswich
vowel patterns with remarkable rapidity and accuracy.
This chapter is
the most complete contemporary description of the grammar of Jamaican Creole, building
on 1960s work by Beryl Bailey and others, and largely illustrated with data
recorded by the author. This draft version appeared 2004 in Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol 2: Morphology and Syntax, ed. Bernd Kortmann, Edgar
W Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend Mesthrie
& Kate Burridge. (Topics
in English Linguistics, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Closs
Traugott.) Berlin, New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
This draft
version of a chapter appeared 2004 in A
Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol 1: Phonology,
ed. Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend
Mesthrie & Kate Burridge.
(Topics in English Linguistics, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth
Closs Traugott.) Berlin, New York:
Mouton de Gruyter. This chapter is a preliminary
description of the not-very-deeply studied phonology of a recent variety,
British Afro-Caribbean English (sometimes called “British Black English”,
“London Jamaican”, or as here, “British Creole”). See also my online bibliography of this variety.
This paper
reconsiders the original notion of acts of identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985), which was based upon studies of
variation in Atlantic Creoles, and explores its contingency upon particular
features of the original data. The mission of exploring the formation of
identity in ‘new’ societies is viewed from a perspective on the historical
development of Creole speech communities. Variation in two (post-) Creole
data-sets is analysed, for some of the same variables studied in Acts: one group (London Jamaican youth)
is typical of that studied under the Acts
paradigm in its diffuseness, while another (urban mesolectal
Jamaicans in Kingston)
is not. A typology of linguistic identity work is suggested – identity
development, identity shift, and identity modification – differentiated by age
and developmental processes, and by degree of reorientation. (This paper
appeared in Christian Mair,
ed. 2003, Interaction-based
sociolinguistics and cultural studies, thematic issue of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
28(2): 249-277. Tübingen: Gunter Narr
Verlag.)
In this paper,
arising out of Straw’s PhD dissertation (“Dialect acquisition and ethnic
boundary maintenance: Barbadians in Ipswich”,
funded by the ESRC), we consider one of the best-studied linguistic variables in
British English dialects in recent years. Looking at glottalisation
of (t) in word-final environments, we identify a previously-unreported pattern
by Anglo speakers in Ipswich (departing from
what we label the Diffusion Pattern, commonly found elsewhere in Britain). Using
instrumental techniques and compon-ential analysis,
following the lead of Docherty & Foulkes (1999), leads us to query earlier
methods and categories for analysing this variable. We also discover that
long-term Barbadian immigrants (whose island speech natively has frequent glottalisation, unlike other Caribbean Englishes)
have neither acquired the Diffusion Pattern nor the Ipswich Pattern, but may be
partly diverging and partly converging, though more research is required here.
This present version developed from a paper given to the Conference on English
Phonology in Toulouse,
July 2002, and
was recently accepted to appear in Language Sciences.
A subsequent paper summarises and adds to
this research by analyzing word-medial environments:
This .pdf file reproduces the paper we gave at the NWAVE-32
conference, 9-12 October 2003, further developing the line of research just
described. In addition to expanding the environments for glottalisation,
we here present spectrographic evidence. This paper highlights the processes
we believe to be at work for the two
generations of Barbadian speakers studied to date in Ipswich: long-term
accommodation for the oldest, dialect acquisition for those who came as
children, and perhaps phonological change (the development of new elements in
the grammar, and possibly even of a distinctive ethnic dialect of Southeastern British English). We note that in word-final
environments, the
Barbadians appear to show the “Ipswich
pattern” for one variant of glottalisation, but not
for classic glottal stops; while in word-medial, they show a wider range of
variants, and diverge noticeably from local Anglo speakers.
This paper
examines an everyday Caribbean oral gesture, an
example of African cultural continuity across the Diaspora. Kiss-teeth is an inherently evaluative and inexplicit paralinguistic
element with a sound-symbolic component, which participates in a system of
indirect discourse. We look at geographical distribution and diffusion in the Americas, and
consider the shared pragmatic functions of the set of related signs – an
interactional resource with multiple possibilities for sequential organization,
often used to negotiate moral positioning among speakers and referents, and
closely linked to community norms and expectations of conduct and attitude. We
illustrate with data ranging from historical to contemporary, oral to literary,
monologic to interactional. Papers drawing on this
article were presented to the Society for Pidgin & Creole Linguistics (4 January 2002 in San Francisco) and the
Society for Caribbean Linguistics' 14th biennial conference in Trinidad (16
August 2002). A briefer Powerpoint
presentation on this topic, given at Sociolinguistic Symposium 15 in Newcastle upon Tyne on 2 April 2004, is available here.
Competing Creole Transcripts on Trial (with Samuel W. Buell)
A criminal prosecution of Jamaican Creole (JC)-speaking ‘posse’
(=gang) members in New York
included evidence of recorded speech in JC. Clandestine recordings (discussions
of criminal events, including narration of a homicide) were introduced at
trial. Taped data were translated for prosecution by a non-linguist native
speaker of JC. Defense counsel disputed the veracity
of these texts and commissioned alternative transcriptions from a creolist linguist, who was a non-speaker of JC. Prosecution
in turn hired another creolist (the author) a
near-native speaker of and specialist in JC, to testify on the relative
accuracy of both sets of earlier texts. Differing representations of key
conversations were submitted to a non-creole speaking
judge/jury, both linguists testified, and defendants were convicted. The role
of linguistic testimony and practice (especially transcription) in the trial is
analysed. A typology of linguistic expertise is given; effects of the
language’s Creole status and lack of instrumentalization
on the trial are discussed. (Lead author submitted expert testimony as a
linguist; second author tried the case as Assistant US District Attorney for
the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn
NY.)
The Speech
Community
This
paper, which developed out of the one below on "Caribbean Creoles and the
Speech Community", was given at NWAVE-28 in Toronto, 17 October 1999, and
at greater length to the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the
University of Edinburgh, 20 January 2000. A revised and much extended version
is published in JK. Chambers, P Trudgill and N
Schilling-Estes, eds. 2001, Handbook of
Language Variation and Change from Blackwell. In it, I
trace the history of the speech community, a core concept in empirical
linguistics, which is at the intersection of many principal problems in
sociolinguistic theory and method. I consider its development and divergence,
survey general problems with contemporary notions, and discuss links to key
issues in investigating language variation and change. I do not offer a 'new
and correct' definition, nor reject the concept (both are misguided efforts),
nor do I exhaustively survey its applications in the field (an impossibly large
task).
This
paper, originally prepared for a volume on Contemporary Approaches to
Language and Religion and recently issued in Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 26 (Nov. 1999), reconsiders a narrative of supernatural
healing told by Coppa, a cane-cutter from St. Thomas
in Eastern Jamaica. (Coppa's account was analyzed as
creatively using the Rasta Talk register in Patrick and Payne-Jackson 1996, Journal
of Linguistic Anthropology 6 (1), 1-38.) Coppa's
healing story draws on elements of several distinct spiritual and occult
traditions in Jamaican folk culture; linguistically, however, it relies on Rastafari discourse, although Rastafarians often oppose
themselves to other Jamaican religions. The reasons for this fusion, and the
nature of his use of Rasta Talk, are explored. (Arvilla
Payne-Jackson and I presented earlier versions of this to the Society for
Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and the Society for Applied Anthropology.) This
paper is also web-published through the Virtual Institute of Caribbean Studies (where it is available as a PDF
download). Visit their Papers section 3, Caribbean History and Culture.
This
is the 2nd in a series of 4 papers summarizing and enlarging upon
the findings of my research since 1989 in a neighborhood
of Kingston, Jamaica, which is reported in full
in the book Urban Jamaican Creole (see below). This one focuses on
enriching the classic variationist conception of the speech
community in order to adequately account for the heterogeneity of varilingual Caribbean Sociolinguistic Complexes. (In a
more recent paper, see above, I extend the program of reconsidering the speech
community concept.) This
talk was given 21st August
1998 to the Society for Caribbean Linguistics' 12th biennial
conference in St. Lucia,
and in longer form at the Center for Research in
Linguistics of the University
of Newcastle, on May 4, 1999 ("Speech
Communities and Creole Continua"). A revised version appeared in June 2002
as Occasional Paper no. 30 of the SCL.
This
is 3rd in the series of 4 papers just noted. It evaluates the creole continuum's usefulness in accounting for variation
in an urban creole, focusing on John Rickford's (1987) criterion of (non-)discreteness:
whether the grammars of different speakers are separated by sharp breaks or are
related in a gradient manner. The basic result is that basilectal
and mesolectal grammars differ from each other
sharply, but above this juncture variation is continuous and non-discrete. This
talk was given 2nd October
1998 at the NWAVE-27 conference at the University of Georgia
in Athens, Ga. A revised version appeared in the U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 6.2: Selected papers from NWAV(E) 27 (pp109-120).
This
paper, 4th in the series of 4 noted above, focuses on John Rickford's (1987) second criterion for the creole continuum, unidimensionality,
the central sociolinguistic claim on which the continuum hypothesis rests. When
social factors are correlated with linguistic patterns for a number of
linguistic variables, can speakers be ordered in a regular way on both axes?
How well do social characteristics explain the patterned choices that speakers
make? Do social factors cohere or diverge: do they lie along a single
dimension, or is a multi-dimensional space required to model their correlations
with linguistic production? How exactly does that work? This paper tests
the notion that variation in linguistic behavior
correlates with social stratification for a major Caribbean urban center (Kingston) in order to discover what, if any,
systematic relation holds between the two dimensions for this speech community.
This paper was given at the University
of Manchester in March
2000, and at the Society for Caribbean Linguistics'
13th biennial conference in August 2000 --
fittingly in Kingston, Jamaica.
Based
on a lexicon, much of which was published in American
Speech
[70(3):227-64, 1995], but with some updating of items. Here I make some
additions to the work of the landmark Dictionary
of Jamaican English (1967, rev. 1980, ed. Frederic G. Cassidy and
Robert B. Le Page; Cambridge University Press). This paper is dedicated to the
late Fred Cassidy, who passed away in summer 2000, with thanks for his help and
friendship. Elements from this lexicon will appear in various forms in the
forthcoming supplement to Richard Allsopp's Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, and in
the forthcoming revision to the Oxford English
Dictionary.
Creoles at the intersection of variable processes:
(TD)-deletion
and past-marking in the Jamaican mesolect
This
slightly revises a paper originally published in Language and Variation and Change [3(2): 171-189], updating references.
It analyzes one of the best-known phonological variables in English, for a
Caribbean English-lexified Creole (it was the first
such examination), and compares it to American English non-standard dialects.
It outlines the interaction of phonological deletion processes with variable
grammatical marking processes, in which JC differs greatly from all varieties
of AmEng. William Labov
discusses the solution I developed here as a technique of quantitative
reasoning he calls “triangulation” (p10, online version). The literature
on the (TD) variable can be explored online, and I have written a general introduction to the variable, both of
which serve as background or expansion for this paper. The subject is treated
in greater length in chapters 5 and 7 of Urban
Jamaican Creole, see below, where I make the case (barely mentioned in the LVC version) that I have not assumed that phonological deletion processes apply in JC – as
several creolists have mistakenly claimed - rather,
this is the conclusion to an empirical investigation supported by large amounts
of data and statistically significant effects.
Information
(including table of contents) for my 1999 book,
published by John
Benjamins of Amsterdam in the series Varieties of
English Around the World.