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Intercultural communication

“We not ship to Russia”

By February 10, 2010June 2nd, 20195 Comments6 min read12,003 views

I went onto e-bay this weekend and, instead of the gadget I was after, found some non-standard uses of English negation: “We not ship to Russia” or “We not use cheap couriers.” The usage seems so frequent with various sellers that it’s hard to believe they don’t know any better. On the contrary, the structure without the auxiliary seems so widespread that it must be intentional.

From an intercultural communication perspective, it makes perfect sense; English negation is really hard to distinguish from the emphatic form: “We don’t ship to Russia” is very similar to the emphatic “We do ship to Russia” and it’s easy for someone with limited proficiency to overlook the puny “n’t” (or not to hear it when spoken).

The non-standard “we not VERB” construction instead of the standard “we don’t VERB” construction by online sellers operating in an international environment is thus a great example of the adaptability of English – and all human languages – to its context of use. Is my little observation on e-bay thus further evidence for the fact that “language structure is partly determined by social structure” as a recent research paper that’s currently making the media circuit has it?

In that paper, Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale, a cognitive scientist and a psychologist, show that languages with large numbers of speakers, wide geographical spread and a high degree of language contact are less likely to have complex morphologies than languages with fewer speakers, limited geographical spread and a low degree of language contact. They call the former languages “exoteric” and the latter “esoteric” and advance a “linguistic niche hypothesis,” which proposes that

Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used.

Their key claim is that “exoteric” languages are learnt by adults and the more adult language learners a language has, the less morphologically complex it is. Negation is one of the variables they analyze and their claim is that “exoteric” languages

[a]re more likely to encode negation using analytical strategies (negative word) than using inflections (affixes) and are less likely to have idiosyncratic variations between word and affixation strategies.

“We not ship to Russia” is the perfect example! Unfortunately, the obvious problem is that “we not ship to Russia” is clearly the most stigmatized way to express negation in English. By contrast, the standard syntactic form to express negation in English is rather opaque. Furthermore, negation is not only expressed syntactically but also morphologically as, for instance, in to unfriend (which I seem to have read somewhere was voted word of the decade by someone). So, I hereby declare myself to be a non-believer of the idea that the theory of evolution applies to language!

Apart from the fact that there are many ways to express negation (or any of the other variables that are featured in the study), I see a couple of issues with some of the premises underlying the study:

  • A language is not a thing, it is not a biological organism. Sometimes, it’s very useful to treat a language as an entity, even as a biological organism, but that’s just a metaphor. Language is a practice, a process that “lives” in interaction.
  • To speak of “a particular language with a name” is always a reification, one that usually relies on political definitions, as I’ve discussed before. Linguistic research that accepts those political definitions as linguistic facts is fundamentally flawed. While it may be neater to only account for the standard language, we miss a key aspect about negation in English if we willfully exclude non-standard phenomena from the account (e.g., double negation (“I ain’t got no money”) in our case)
  • In language learning, it’s rarely only a case of survival of the fittest. From an intercultural communication viewpoint “We not ship to Russia” is clearly superior to “We don’t ship to Russia” and the former could thus be said to be “fitter” than the latter. Even so, the former is not going to displace the latter anytime soon because there are standard language ideologies, language teachers, textbooks, common usage and what not that are intervening in the evolutionary scenario. Admittedly, the authors do provide a little nod in that direction:

Morphological simplification following spread may greatly reduced [sic!] through prescriptivism (namely, formal instruction) as was common in the case of the spread of Russian in the 20th century.

  • Does morphological complexity equal difficulty? Linguistic difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, for instance, I find Chinese, a language that has very little by way of morphological complexity, pretty daunting because of the tones. English is another language with comparatively limited morphological complexity but it sure makes up for that with phrasal words (take out, take over, take along, take in, take off, take up … huh?!)
  • Does number of language users, geographic spread and degree of language contact equal “social structure”? Not in my book.
  • How do you measure “degree of language contact”? The authors identify the degree of language contact as the “number of linguistic neighbors derived from Ethnologue [1] and the Global Mapping Institute [33].” Apart from the fact that I’m not sure this explains their procedure in full, this begs two key questions:
    • Linguistic neighbors of which variety? For example, Irish English or Indian English? Indian English clearly has more “linguistic neighbors” and more intense contact with them than Irish English.
    • At which point in time? The transformation of English from an inflectional language to an isolating one took place in the Middle Ages. That was clearly a time of intense language contact (Scandinavian settlement and Norman invasion) although it seems that the intensity of the contact situation mattered more than the number of languages involved. At the same time, at the time, English was really only spoken by a handful of speakers in a limited geographical area in the British Isles – so on Lupyan’s and Dale’s scale it would have been closer to the “esoteric” end of the continuum when the key grammatical transformation happened. How can contemporary data, collected at a single point in time, tell us anything about evolution?

Language is intricately linked to the social life of speakers. Humans “do things with words” and they do so in social contexts. I regard that as a fundamental of all thinking about language. Linguistic research should enhance our understanding of that fundamental in meaningful ways. If language gets reduced to one variable (“morphological complexity) and social structure to three variables (“number of speakers, geographical spread, degree of language contact) I cannot help but feel that the research has missed the mark. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”, as Einstein would have said.

Reference

Lupyan G, & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5 (1) PMID: 20098492

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 5 Comments

  • Tsu Dho Nimh says:

    When I wrote global English, I always made sure to expand contractions to the parent form because they can be easily misunderstood.

    But it not require me speak like Og the Caveman!

    “We don’t ship to Russia” becomes ‘We do not ship to Russia.”

  • Vahid says:

    Dear Ingrid,

    I declare myself to be a non-believer of the idea that the theory of evolution can describe everything about language! But, as you know, usually those who strongly believe in the evolution of language believe that the phenomenon should be examined from the viewpoint of memory. If we take into account what for example Pinker (1999) claims to be the case in the development of language, some points may become more tangible.

    Pinker believes that we come to this world as infants, we naturally begin to experience the world, to know entities around us and as a result semantic categories will be formed in our mind. To be able to live, we need to know our world. According to Pinker (1999), our ancestors, like us, needed to know their world to lead a better life; but the amount of knowledge around them was too much too be recorded in their memories, and as a result natural selection, one of the most important processes of evolution, selected some knowledge vital for their lives. Therefore natural selection has turned anything human beings have encountered a lot or has been vital for their survival and reproduction into instincts. In other words, human beings during their evolution needed to have certain semantic knowledge to know their environment and this knowledge had to be the same wherever they lived. In fact natural selection turned this knowledge into a kind of instinct inscribed in our semantic memory.

    Then our episodic memory evolved to enable human beings to record detailed information. It is exactly this kind of knowledge which is not general or universal but depends on the environment/context.

    To summarize, as claimed by Pinker, we have a part of our knowledge as instinct in our mind, and we gain another part through our daily experiences.

    Health & Peace,
    Vahid

    Pinker, S. (1999). How the Mind Works. W.W. Norton Publishers.

  • Britta Schneider says:

    Ah, I so much like these discussions on “evolution” as they are really omnipresent in so many arguments and then, evolution is so often seen as something that has no agent. What then came to my mind was something I read this morning, where Blommaert and Huang say we need to

    “reintroduce history as a real category of analysis. The simplicity is, however, deceptive of course, for what is
    required is a toolkit of concepts that are intrinsically historical; that is: concepts whose very nature and direction point towards connections between the past and the present in terms of social activities – concepts, in short, that define and explain synchronic social events in terms of their histories of becoming as social events.”
    Blommaert & Huang. 2009. “Historical bodies and historical space.” Journal of Applied Linguistics

    Saying that we no ship to Russia is, I think, better grasped as social event than in terms of evolution, so I am also a non-believer. It is fascinating how “morphological complexity” symbolically can function in discourses on linguistic evolution (that are then used to legitimize social inequality). Thank you for this really interesting post!

  • Ingrid Piller says:

    Exactly my point that we need to speak about “contexts of use” rather than “English” (or any other language) as one entity. I like your term “linguistic fitness landscape”!

  • Interrobang says:

    I think it’s useful to speak of language evolution, but you have to understand what evolution is before it really makes sense. Evolution is a consequense, not a process, which is dependent upon the landscape in which it operates. Hence “We not” may thrive in the fitness landscape known as eBay because it’s clear and easily understood by non-native speakers, many of whose native languages may do negation in exactly that way; but “We not” will not thrive in a fitness landscape where it is stigmatised, because it will be crowded (or corrected) out by “We do not” or “We don’t.”

    I mean, if algorithms and antenna designs can literally evolve, why not languages?

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