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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 1 of 7 07 April 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
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Register can be strict enough that some words have equivalents depending who one speaks to and not just a
different shade of meaning. All languages have politeness and informality to some degree, but could some make theirs strict enough to be somewhat grammatical? Hear this analogy, it isn't the best though: Slavic verbs have perfective and imperfective aspect, right? One implies perfective aspect and the other doesn't. But a similar semantic equivalent can be found in English phrasal verbs. We have "eat" but we could say "eat up" to imply a completed action. "Burn through" "Write down" etc. But it is not as elaborated nor grammaticalized to the point that the absence of saying such implies an absence of completion, nor is there enough consistency or complexity to equal Slavic aspect pairs at all. Could we view register as a grammatical factor for vocabulary learning? If strict enough, I would see register as a grammaticalization of a definition with different words. Some like Korean and Japanese have inflections and those are considered grammatical, but Khmer for example uses different words depending on who one speaks to on top of pronouns. Chinese had pretty complex pronoun usage as well in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_honorifics Of course I know what the alternative view is, register is just a matter of culture and vocabulary choice, not aspect, tense, case, mood, and everything else, but I do think register can be more complex in one language than another. How should the common person see it? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 08 April 2014 at 1:14pm | IP Logged |
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In my book 'register' is a question of ways to use a language, like being deferential to a superior, stern when speaking to your ennemies or very casual when speaking to a child. And in practice it is hard not to see 'register' being an important part of stylistics, even though a style can be defined in terms of specific points on pronunciation, grammar and choice of words.
But you also raise another question, namely the place of aspect in the description of a language. The simple answer is that aspect (in the past tenses) is founded on morphology in Spanish, because the paradigms in question are seen as forms of specific words. In the Slavic languages (like Russian) it is tempting to see the verbal pairs as forms of one verb. But they are actually always seen as pairs of verbs, probably because the differences between the verbs in a pair aren't always easy to predict, and because the forms of each verb in a pair generally have the same forms (when we accept that the presents of imperfect verbs are undestinguishable from the socalled future tense of the perfective verbs). But what then with English, where you can add adverbs (or rather prepositions used as advrbs) to a verb and then often discover that they then have acquired a perfective meaning? Those prepositions are even harder to predict than the affixes of Russian verbs, so you can't claim that verbs with this kind of behaviour form paradigms. The phenomenon should certainly be mentioned in the syntactical sections of your grammars, but it is also a part of your vocabulary learning, with strong ties to formal lexicology. The one thing that it isn't, is being a question of register. Edited by Iversen on 08 April 2014 at 1:21pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 3 of 7 08 April 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you Iversen,
The point I am making is that some languages do have strict corresponding pairs of words based on formality that can be put into chart or dictionary form. Thai has "kinkao" for normal conversation, but "rabpratan" when polite, both mean "eat". This is not as much a mere choice of vocabulary where one would say "dine" "consume" "have dinner" in our western languages, politeness is very important in their language. So "Kinkao" is the counterpart to "rabpratan". In practice, is it different from the way Japanese suffixes -masu or prefixes O- to its words? If the exact counterparts of one word is neatly defined across a chart for each level of formality, isn't it part of the grammar in the same way Korean or Japanese uses inflections? If not, how do you view morphology being used for register as different, or does that too not count? Edited by Stolan on 08 April 2014 at 10:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5022 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 4 of 7 08 April 2014 at 10:43pm | IP Logged |
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I can imagine situations where what is grammatical in one register is ungrammatical in another register. For instance, many of the verbal constructions of Black English are ungrammatical in higher (add quotes if you want) registers. And perhaps vice versa.
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| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4102 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 5 of 7 09 April 2014 at 12:20am | IP Logged |
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I think register should be a second-order concern. It would be overbearing to burden
yourself with multiple shades of the same basic meaning from the start. I think register is one of those things that you can definitely best obtain outside of studying. To answer the OP properly, I think that some management of expectation should be done, and we should accept that inappropriateness, be it severe or subtle, will be the rule and not the exception for most of our utterances at a pre-advanced level. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6950 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 7 09 April 2014 at 8:29am | IP Logged |
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I'm having a bit of trouble seeing the point of the original post. Is it the notion of register that we're after? Its relevance to language learning? Sociolinguistic concerns?
The question is open-ended (that "should" in the original question makes it seem as if there's a "proper" way to deal with register) but based on your participation in or even initiation of other threads which are more suitable for a linguistics forum I wager that you'll be hard-pressed to get a satisfying answer here without digging up monographs or studies on your own. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 7 09 April 2014 at 9:48am | IP Logged |
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There is certainly a sociological dimension to this, but I have chosen to focus on the lingustic aspect: at which point in the description of a language should we put the notion of register? And giving a simple answer that covers all elements in a complicated system of politeness formula is impossible, but we can point out certain features of languages that belong to different registers - and politeness may not be the only manifestation of registers, but it is easily the most important. The difference between a written/literary register and a spoken register (as in French) is another.
OK, let's say that a language has a lot of corresponding pairs of words, where one word signals a deferential attitude and the other a quite informal one. We have in most Indoeuropan languages a difference in the second person pronouns, and these are definitely something you can organize in tables with the same parameters as verbs (person, number) AND nouns and adjectives (number, case). But apart from that it is hard to point to anything that can be put into tables. OK, you can make lists, but a dictionary is also a list. Insofar there is anything grammatical about politeness it is at the upper fringe of syntax, where it borders to stylistics and idiomatics. Aspect in the Slavic languages is however organized in a way that places it close to morphology, if it isn't actually morphology. The point is not only that there are stable wordpairs (or in some cases sets of one imperfective verb against 2-3 perfective ones), but also that the number of derivation rules is limited: there are a few infixes that make perfective verbs imperfective, there is a small number of prefixes that make imperfective perfective, and finally there is a tencdency to organize verb pairs with -atj and -itj as resp. the imperfective and the perfective partner. If this isn't acctually morphology, then it is close to being it. The problem is that it isn't really syntax either - the rules for the use of aspect are definitely syntactic, but the relation between the two elements in a pair are hovering in the space between lexicology and morphology. And that's also the case for a lot of other kinds of words derivation. So if there is a way to make lots of different words in a language polite through derivation, then it is either morphological in nature or it belongs to the grey zone I just described. But if all the wordpairs are impossible to predict then it has nothing to do with morphology, maybe or maybe not something to do with syntax, but certainly a lot to do with lexicology and even more with stylistics. Edited by Iversen on 09 April 2014 at 11:05am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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