Abstract
The “Twenty-Seven Views” alluded to in the title of the current chapter correspond to the individual chapters of a recent book edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin (eds.; The handbook of language socialization, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2012, pp. xvi + 660. As to the year of publication, there is a slight divergence between the book’s cover page and colophon, where the year is given as “2012,” and the bottom lines of the individual chapters, where the year occurs as “2011”). The excess “plus one” view is the present author’s: It will pop up with intermittent and unexpected intervals throughout the text, and in this way do more than merely present a conspectus of the work under consideration; rather, it aims to compare and evaluate the (sometimes very divergent) earlier and contemporary views on language socialization presented here and elsewhere in the literature, and thus endeavors to achieve some measure of convergence, if not homogeneity, of the various authors’ points of view.
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Notes
- 1.
From my own childhood, I recall how the prevalent tendency in certain progressive circles to deconstruct parental authority made my parents institute the “T-form” of address in interaction with their children; however, as the surrounding context of other families diverged sharply in this respect, my two-year younger brother at one point begged to be taught to use the “V-form,” the way he had heard other children address their parents.
- 2.
Falsely induced shaming-based guilt may backfire, though, when used as an educational measure. I recall how my kindergarten teacher, whenever she wanted to shame me, would refer to my “littleness” (I was a small child for my age), by bringing her right-hand thumb and forefinger closely together, so as to index my diminutive stature and thereby symbolize my “child-like” behavior. My reaction was to both resist the shaming and reject the implicit lesson, whatever it may have been; however, given my age and the strongly Evangelical Christian background of the school, I could not do this verbally.
- 3.
Following Hugh Kenner’s “Uncle Charles principle,” speakers may also appropriate words spoken by others to characterize the person or a situation (as in “Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse”, the famous Joyce quote that gave rise to the moniker; Kenner 1978, Chap. 2).
- 4.
As an illiterate Westerner in Japan, I experienced the advantages of kanji writing over alphabetic lettering when, in the early days of my stay, I was able to identify, from way in the distance, the city bus I needed to catch in order to get to my place, simply by looking at the leftmost big character on the front of the bus (the Japanese numeral “5,” pronounced “go,” being the first syllable of the full place name, “Gotanda”), rather than struggling with the toponym’s other, intricate characters (or for that matter, with the Arabic numeral for the bus itself, as this happened to be a “9” and, being very small, was hard to make out).
- 5.
The same considerations could be applied to other, similar ideological constructs like the lusofonia, established for the realm of Portuguese-speaking areas (motherland and former colonies, such as Brazil, Angola, Cabo Verde, Timor Leste, or Moçambique).
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Mey, J. (2016). Twenty-Seven Views (Plus One) of Language Socialization. In: Capone, A., Mey, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_37
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