Stylistic analysis on Toni Morrison: Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 2004
Smith (1992: 75) spoke succinctly to the concern about loss of intelligibility across varieties: ‘My response … is that for at least the last two hundred years there have been English-speaking people in some parts of the world who have (c) 2011 Hong Kong University Press. All Rights Reserved. not been intelligible to other English-speaking people in other parts of the world. It is a natural phenomenon when any language becomes so widespread.’ By adopting this commonsense and empirically arguable stance on the issue, Smith does away with recourse to emotional sorts of reactions to the spread of English. The reflexive cry ‘something must be done!’ is set aside in favour of a reasoned exploration. Holistic approaches to intelligibility are difficult to carry off: it becomes clear, as illustrated in the examples above, that there are various levels of language and of the perception of language at work in communicating with other speakers of English. Strevens’ proposal of separating accent from the other layers of language was a step in the direction of allowing for more specific approaches and an understanding of the parameters of successful verbal interaction. ‘I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me’ could have one or a combination of senses. It might be intended to mean ‘couldn’t make out the words themselves’ because of any number of factors, such as the speaker’s pronunciation or volume, or background noise distractions, not to mention the speaker’s using another language. [unique_solution]It might be intended to convey ‘didn’t know what some key words meant’, as in listening to someone speaking about a technical topic such as setting up a computer. It is important to have clear ways of addressing the specific categories of parameters we wish to investigate. Smith (1992; see also Smith and Nelson, 1985) analysed the holistic language-in-use notion of understanding, or ‘intelligibility’ in a broad sense, into three components: intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability. These components form a continuum of complexity within which intelligibility involves the fewest variables and interpretability, the most. Intelligibility in this scheme refers to the level of sound and parsing utterances into recognizable or plausible words, as in the example at the beginning of this chapter. The US writer who places the bet — ‘punt’ — and the British turf accountant — ‘bookie’ — each believe the other to be speaking English. That is, an intelligible English utterance is one that sounds like English — just that. This categorization allows for the everyday phenomenon of hearing an unfamiliar word or ‘not catching’ some part of an utterance. In such cases, the entire exchange does not break down; clarification and repair devices come into play, e.g., ‘Excuse me?’; ‘Would you mind saying that again?’; ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that’; or the missed element is stored for checking later; or it may simply be passed over, with the hearer relying on the redundancy in the overall message. In a study by Smith and Rafiqzad (1979), for example, subjects heard a tape of a passage and filled in words from it in its printed cloze passage version.2 Being able to approximate a representation of sounds heard by writing them down was counted as a successful demonstration of intelligibility. It must be said, and kept in mind, that writers very often use the word ‘intelligibility’ not in this limited, technical sense, but as a holistic cover term for the degree of success in communication. (c) 2011 Hong Kong University Press. All Rights Reserved. Parameters of intelligibility 67 68 World Englishes in Asian Contexts Comprehensibility, the next level of complexity in Smith’s analysis, involves assigning meaning to utterances, approximately the conventional basic sense of ‘understanding’. For example, successful comprehensibility involves apprehending an utterance table as meaning ‘table’, the word, and recognizing that it refers to an appropriate category or specific referent in the world so that it fits meaningfully into the current utterance, as in Please put the package on the table, Invite guests of the committee to the table, Table a motion, or Insert data into cells in a table. It is this level of linguistic interaction that is at risk when, say, unfamiliar technical terms come up in listening to an information technology troubleshooter explain to you why your e-mail is sending all your messages to Nome. In the example above, the American correctly understood that he was risking some money against the chance of a higher pay-off, but did not understand what sort of bet an ‘each-way’ was. In such cases, the discourse sounds like English, so its intelligibility is high; but some of the information is not coming through from speaker to hearer, so comprehensibility is lowered. This is the situation that may arise, for example, in conversations across varieties of world Englishes when speakers introduce a borrowed lexical item, or a short stretch of mixing. For example, B. Kachru cites this example from an Indian newspaper matrimonial advertisement (1992a: 311): ‘Correspondence invited, preferably for mutual alliance … . ’ Kachru explains: ‘The term mutual alliance is a culturally significant collocation; it refers to an arrangement by which X’s daughter marries Y’s son and Y’s daughter marries X’s son. … [O]ne obvious advantage is that it restricts the giving or receiving of the dowry.’ This ‘culturally significant’ term is one that would have to be made clear by a knowledgeable informant to someone not familiar with the Indian context, specifically with regard to customs of marriage arrangements. If there is no one to ask, the outsider must rely on further discoursal and contextual clues to infer a meaning for such an element. The most complex level of communication, and the most important one, according to Smith (1992: 83), is that of interpretability. Beyond recognition of the medium and its elements (intelligibility) and recognition of meanings which may be reasonably assigned to words and phrases (comprehensibility) within a specific context, speakers discern the purpose and intent of an utterance. For example, there is a joke about the writing instructor who tells her class that a double negative such as don’t have no … makes a positive, but that a double positive does not make a negative, and a student responds with, Yeah, right. A speaker’s transforming yeah ‘yes’ plus right ‘you are correct’ into the equivalent of That’s not so or I don’t believe it and the hearer’s realizing that intent is a demonstration of interpretability at work. The following passage from the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee (1989: 48) provides some further exemplification of these domains. In this paragraph the protagonist has been made an offer of marriage by the widower referred (c) 2011 Hong Kong University Press. All Rights Reserved. to in the passage, and her teacher — ‘Masterji’ is probably transparent to world English readers, if they compare ‘schoolmaster’ — has come to confer with her father, to insist that she not be married off, but allowed to continue her education: Masterji must have heard that he was likely to lose me to the Ludhiana widower. He biked all the way to our adobe compound one Sunday morning, his white beard rolled spiffily tight and his long hair tucked under a crisp chartreuse turban, to confront my father … He was even carrying a kirpan, which meant that for him this was a special occasion. Masterji was a Sikh. All Sikh men in our village … kept their hair and beards, but very few went around with their ceremonial daggers strapped to their chests all day long. There is no problem of intelligibility here: the few words that may not be familiar to international English readers are plausible English words. Even ‘kirpan’, not marked as not-English in the text, is readable and pronounceable. The name-ending ‘-ji’ is repeated often enough in the narrative and dialogue of the work at large (‘Pitaji’ for reference to the father, ‘Mataji’ for the mother) that the reader may quickly pick it up as a term of respect: that is, it becomes comprehensible with just a little exposure. Similarly, looping back naturally through the passage after encountering the plain assertion ‘[He] was a Sikh’ shows readers some desсrіptive criteria of such a man, e.g., having a beard long enough to be rolled, having hair long enough to be tucked up, and wearing a turban. And the offered interpretation of those details is made plain by the author’s narrative, ‘… which meant that for him this was a special occasion’. The author employs a similar retrospective device to ‘translate’ kirpan, the one lexical item that might have remained a bit of a mystery, with the reference to ‘their ceremonial daggers …’. Multilingual creative authors make decisions about what parts of their texts they will elucidate in such ways, and which to leave more to the reading skills of their audiences. If one imagines transforming this scene into a live play with spoken dialogue, then the features of the text would work in exactly the corresponding ways in the spoken medium. In the same ways, while the mutual alliance phrase in the matrimonial advertisement quoted from just above can probably be dealt with as a matter of lexical meaning (comprehensibility), the following one, also from a matrimonial advertisement cited by B. Kachru (1992a: 311) requires an added element of interpretation: ‘Matrimonial correspondence invited from respected Punjabi families for my son … clean shaven.’ The desсrіptive phrase, says Kachru, ‘has a serious religious connotation: it is indicative of non- conformism with traditional Sikhism in India’. Sikh men, cf. the passage by Mukherjee above, traditionally maintain long hair and beards. Some modern, Westernized Sikhs, however, prefer to be clean shaven. The implications of such a disclaimer can only be sensed by someone with some close degree of familiarity with the relevant cultures.