Zooming In, Zooming Out:
From Kwéyòl’s Powerful Little Words to Creoles in Classrooms & Communities
My research program centers on contact-induced language emergence and change, context-dependent features of language, and the knowledge and lived experiences of those who use, teach, and study Creoles and other Black language practices. This work requires that I “zoom in” to closely study the linguistic properties of particular language varieties, but also “zoom out” to consider how marginalized languages are approached in linguistics and in communities more broadly. In this talk, I highlight research from both ends of this continuum.
First, I “zoom in” on pragmatic markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik (Dominica Creole) and in its colonial source languages: English and French. Pragmatic markers, or “little words” (Bouchard, 2000; Bolden, 2006), are powerful, multifunctional words and phrases that allow us to express our attitudes and cognitive states, coordinate discourse, and index our identities. As such, they also function as artifacts of a community’s culture and history of language contact. This portion of the talk addresses two studies with implications for our understanding of language contact, emergence, variation, and use at the discourse-pragmatic level: a corpus-based analysis of four Kwéyòl markers as compared with their English and French counterparts and an examination of Kwéyòl and English users’ metalinguistic knowledge about their markers.
Next, I “zoom out” to discuss my community-based, collaborative work on Creole languages in linguistics pedagogy. Drawing upon insights from interviews with Creole language users, from a questionnaire for linguists, and from a workshop bringing together members of both groups, this project has yielded recommendations and resources for integrating Creoles and other mis-/underrepresented languages into linguistics courses.
References
Bolden, G. B. (2006). Little words that matter: discourse markers ‘‘so’’ and ‘‘oh’’ and the doing of other-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication, 56(4), 661–688.
Bouchard, R. (2000) M'enfin !!! Des 'petits mots' pour les "petites" émotions ?. In Plantin, C., Doury, M., & Traverso, V. (Eds.). Les émotions dans les interactions. Presses Universiatires de Lyon.