Scottish-themed comedy

Yesterday on Dutch tv in De Wereld Draait Door: comedian Marc-Marie Huijbregts shows the new tartan of his native Tilburg, the first city in the Netherlands to get their own tartan. For the occasion, he is wearing a kilt.

Backwards.

Oh well, they can be in their own selection of tv gaffes next Monday.

(Click "Bekijk Uitzending"; Marc-Marie's fashion faux pas starts approx. 4 minutes into the show.)

Weird dreams, and non-inclusive we

I never remember dreams, but I had a particularly strange one last night that did somehow stick. I was at some conference in a venue I didn't recognize, and there was some talk going on. I'm not entirely sure where I was at that point. After some introductory slides, the speaker handed over to me to discuss the results. Obviously I hadn't prepared anything, so I got two minutes to read through the handout I was then to talk the audience through. Then I started:

So what we did – and with that I mean non-inclusive we – ...

realized something, and interrupted my flow of speech:

That's a strange kind of non-inclusive we, you may want to note that down, Geoff.

'Cause obviously Geoff Pullum was there. He wrote it down.

Then I woke up. I have no idea what the presentation was about, and what the results were. A pity, for I'm sure it was very interesting.

Inclusive and non-inclusive we
Some languages make a difference between two kinds of we. There is the inclusive we: me, possibly some other people, and you. We're going to the cinema, and we're going to have fun. And then there's non-inclusive (or exclusive) we: me, some other people, but not you. We're going to the cinema, and you can't come. Ha-hah.

But the non-inclusive we from my dream presentation is different. This we means some other people, maybe you (I'll get to that), but definitely not me. We analyzed some data, but I have nothing to do with it. Really it conveys a lot of the meaning that normally you would use they for; the only difference I suppose is that this time, the I is taking some of the responsibility, at least at an affectionate level, for what they did.

I suppose it's got to do with the tension between individual identity and group (corporate?) identity: I didn't personally analyze any data, I don't even have any idea what the data is about, but the group that I'm speaking for, did, and does; and I suppose in that case you do want to use a first-person pronoun.

With regard to the inclusion of you in this we, I don't think it's the same thing as nurses' talk (And how are we doing today, Mr Smith? Well, I don't know how you're feeling, but I'm feeling crap.) although there are probably some links between nurses' talk and this corporate we. How about

What we're going to do next is analyze some data.

Here it's quite possible that there's a you and some other people who will analyze some data, but that I am not getting anywhere near GoldVarb.

I wonder whether Geoff Pullum has actually written this down, and if there's anything about this type of we in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

What I did at SS17

THURSDAY

Plenary: Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), 'Endangered language documentation and sociolinguistics: the case of Bolivia'

Session 1:
Miriam Meyerhoff (Edinburgh) & James Walker (York, Canada)
'On the social salience of grammatical variation: existentials in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)'

Session 2:
Paul Kerswill, Arfaan Khan & Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster)
'Multicultural London English and linguistic innovation'

Session 3:
Frans Gregersen (København)
'Bridging the gap: from macro-macro sociolinguistic analyses to variationist analyses and beyond'

Poster session

• Nadia Nocchi (Zürich), 'Phonetic variants for social variables: some remarks on labiovelars in Tuscany'


• Ariën van Wijngaarden (Amsterdam), 'Ethnic variation: morpho-syntactic aspects of Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch'

Session 4:
David Britain, Jennifer Amos & Juliette Spurling (Essex)
'Yod-dropping on the East Anglian periphery'

Session 5:
Carmen Llamas & Dom Watt (York)
'Rhoticity in four Scottish/English border localities'

Session 6:
Sander van der Harst (Utrecht)
'Regional variation in Standard Dutch vowels'

Session 7:
Isa Buchstaller & Karen Corrigan (Newcastle)
'Towards a syntactic atlas of Northern England: micro and macro aspects of the interplay between grammar, geography and gender'

Session 8:
Heinrich Ramisch (Bamberg)
'The Northern Subject Rule and its 'northernness': a geolinguistic perspective'

Session 9:
Monika Edith Schulz (Freiburg)
'Past possession and past obligation in traditional British English dialects: the case of had got to'


FRIDAY

Plenary:
Charles Goodwin (UCLA)
'The categories Speaker and Hearer as interactive processes'

Session 1:
Stefan Engelberg (Mannheim)
'Language policies and language contact in the German colonies in the South Pacific'

Session 2:
Bettina Beinhoff (Cambridge)
'Accent and identity: are some non-native speaker accents of English 'better' than others?'

Session 3:
Julia Sallabank (SOAS)
'Endangered language maintenance and social networks'

Poster session

• Hanna Lappalainen (Helsinki): 'Macro and micro perspectives on explaining variation in the use of personal pronouns'

Session 4:
Katharina Straßl (Bern)
'L1, Standard German and local dialect: language choice of immigrant children in the German-speaking part of Switzerland'

Session 5:
Charlotte Gooskens & Sebastian Kürschner (Groningen)
Swedish-Danish word intelligibility

Session 6:
Leen Impe (Leuven)
'Mutual intelligibility of Dutch language varieties: linguistic and extra-linguistic determinants'

Session 7:
Csilla Bartha (Eötvös Loránd, Budapest)
'Language shift in Romani-speaking communities in Hungary: combining macro and micro interpretations'

Session 8:
Remco Knooihuizen (Edinburgh)
'The interplay of language shift and new-dialect formation: the development of Shetland Scots'

Session 9:
Joseph Gafaranga (Edinburgh)
'Towards an interactional model for language maintenance in immigrant contexts'

Plenary
Jasone Cenoz (Euskal Herriko)
'Multilingual educuation for minorities: research methods and achievements'


SATURDAY

Session 1:
Michael Hornsby (Southampton)
'The thwarting of the linguistic subordination norm: whom does it serve?'

Session 2:
Mathilde Jansen (Meertens Instituut)
'Dialect levelling on the island of Ameland' -- cancelled

Session 3:
Wilbert Heeringa & Frans Hinskens (Groningen)
'Sound change in Dutch dialects: 1874 versus 1996'

Session 4:
Meilute Ramoniene (Vilnius)
'Age and language choice in multilingual settings of Lithuania'

Session 5:
R Vandekerckhove (Antwerpen)
'Intralingual subtitling of Dutch on Flemish television: contradictory evaluations of the linguistic scene in Flanders'

Session 6:
Sabine Jautz (Siegen)
'Relational work and constructing identity: expressions of gratitude in British and New Zealand English radio phone-ins'

Poster session

• Golnaz Nanbakhsh (Edinburgh), 'Address terms in Tehran Persian: gender, politeness and language attitudes'


• Ifigenia Papageorgiou (Edinburgh), 'Linguistic heterogeneity in the Greek educational system: a sociolinguistic approach to the 'cross cultural' policy'


• Elma Nap-Kolhoff & Tamara van Schilt-Mol (Tilburg), 'Short and middle-long-term effects of early childhood education in the Netherlands on children's Dutch language proficiency'

Session 7:
Nanna Haug Hilton (York)
'The variation and social meaning of stress assignment in Hønefoss Norwegian'

Session 8:
Terttu Nevalainen (Helsinki)
'The diffusion of linguistic changes in real time: leaders, laggards and the in-betweens'

Session 9:
Catharina Peersman (Leuven)
'"Litteris vulgariter in lingua romana expositis": the use of Old French in the charters of the abbey of Ninove (1137-1350)'

Plenary:
William Labov (U Penn)
'Cognitive capacities of the sociolinguistic monitor'


SOME TALKS I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE

• Kutlay Yagmur & Eveline van Kooi (Tilburg), 'Language maintenance and shift patterns of Dutch immigrants in Turkey'


• Robert Lawson (Glasgow), 'A violent vernacular? Unpacking the associations between language and violence in Glasgow'


• Rias van den Doel (Utrecht), 'Similarity between L1 regional variation and L2 deviation, and its implications for the language learner'


• Mercedes Durham (Glasgow/Aberdeen), '"The dialect doesna seem to be very cool": language attitudes in young Shetland speakers'


• Jenny Nilsson & Margareta Svahn (SOFI, Sweden), 'Context influence on intra-individual dialect variation: the case of [r] and [R] in West Swedish teenager conversation'


• Susanne Wagner (Freiburg), 'Frequencies, quality and quantity: how best to analyse null subjects in English'


• Søren Beck Nielsen, Christina Fogtmann & Torben Juul Jensen (København): 'From community to conversation, and back: generic use of second person pronouns in Danish'


• Ulrike Vogl & Matthias Hüning (FU Berlin), 'Why Dutch? how to account for changes in language use over time'

MY PRIZES

Best talk: Nanna Haug Hilton
Best discussion after talk: Heinrich Ramisch
Best plenary: Charles Goodwin
Best poster: Nadia Nocchi