Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Posts Tagged ‘linguistics’

How sociolinguistics can help you!

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I’ve talked about sociolinguistics here before, in the context of accents. It’s essentially about how language differs across social boundaries, and how it is used to indicate membership in various kinds of social groups. These can be class groups, interest-related groups, regional groups, etc.

This is extremely useful for writing about science fiction and fantasy worlds.

As you put your world together, ask yourself how your people divide themselves up. Is it by town? By side of town (other side of the tracks, etc.)? Is it by larger geographical region? Is it by profession? By upper and lower class?

Once you’ve decided on the divisions, think through how these divisions might be linguistically indicated. Is there a pattern of speech that is considered particularly sophisticated? One that is very lowbrow? Is there a group, such as traders or port workers, whose language mixes with other languages from the nearby regions? How would that influence their speech, and how would such speech be regarded by those around them?

I’m not talking about slang, necessarily, though slang can be one of your tools. Pidgin/creole languages can also help you. You can also choose phonological differences, like the dropping of a final consonant on some kinds of words, to indicate the speech of a social group. Keep in mind that the social divisions you create can be distinguished by virtually any of the various measures I’ve been discussing: phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary use, pragmatics (!) etc.

Drawing linguistic distinctions between social groups is one of the best ways to help a created society take on extra dimension. So do give this some thought as you go forward.

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How sociolinguistics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics
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How pragmatics can help you!

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Pragmatics is an area of linguistics that I love, but which is difficult to define. Witness Mr. Paul Levinson, who spent an entire chapter trying to separate it from semantics in his textbook. Argh!

So what is Pragmatics? Basically, it deals with those areas of meaning which aren’t really meaning. What does that mean? It deals with implications (in the lingo, “implicature”), and with presuppositions, and with using language to do things rather than just send messages.

I think most people know about presuppositions, even if they can’t give a name to them. An example would be when the lawyer asks the plaintiff,

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Either a yes or no answer will contain the presupposition that the plaintiff beat his wife. Thus, in order to avoid tacit acceptance of the idea that he’s beaten his wife, the plaintiff has to reject the question. There are many words like this. “Manage to,” for example, which presupposes that the person has “tried to.”

The usefulness of presuppositions in story-writing lies in their ability to carry extra implied meaning. If you say that your character “didn’t do” something, we know nothing about whether he or she wanted to do that thing, or tried. “Didn’t manage to do” tells us a heck of a lot more in just two additional words. So keep an eye out for these as helpers in the creation of point of view as well as ways to layer meaning into your story.

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time you’ll have noticed that I’ve talked about H.P. Grice and the Cooperative Principle more than once. Essentially the Cooperative Principle says, “make your contribution to the conversation optimally relevant and appropriate.” This may seem terribly obvious, but it is in fact quite powerful. This is because the assumption of cooperativeness allows us to draw conclusions from what people say.

Let’s say someone tells you “I have two children.” From the point of view of strict truthfulness, this could be true so long as that person had two or more children. But the Cooperative Principle lets us conclude that if the person had more than two children, they would be telling us that. Thus, we conclude that the person has two, and only two, children. Grice calls this the “maxim of quantity.”

There are other Gricean maxims, but I won’t go into all of them here. I’ll just mention that the “maxim of quality” means that you’re not lying (I’ll return to the issue of lying, and its implications in stories, in a minute).

I’ve probably also mentioned “speech acts.” These are instances of “doing by speaking,” as when you invite, insult, refuse, swear, promise, marry, etc.. The action is accomplished by the utterance of the speech. I encourage you to think about these, because they often have social consequences. What kind of unique speech acts might a world have? In what contexts might they occur? What are the special conditions required for the act to be performed successfully (you can’t marry two people to one another unless you possess special qualifications, for example)?

In my story, “Let the Word Take Me”, every utterance was an act – an act of holy transport or blasphemy, or of respectful restraint – and was restricted by special conditions of person, time and place. This is an extreme example of the type, but there is a lot of interesting stuff to be gained by playing with speech acts in alternate cultural scenarios.

The other issue that Pragmatics covers is that of Politeness. This is extremely rich ground for story ideas, especially because Politeness often conflicts directly with the Gricean Maxims. In particular, it’s easy to misinterpret polite avoidance of particular topics as evasiveness or lying. We do a lot of effortful things in order to avoid threatening other people’s “face,” also called committing “face-threatening acts.” Brown and Levinson 1987 is the classic source of this discussion.

Interestingly, Brown and Levinson talk about two types of social desires: the desire to be autonomous (negative face), and the desire to be accepted (positive face). These contrast with one another, and while polite and diffident talk addresses another person’s desire to be autonomous, that desire may not be foremost in their minds. Familiar talk (including slang and insider vocabulary) addresses another person’s desire to be accepted. The choice between these two strategies is critical to a person’s success.

The other reason I love pragmatics as a source for stories is this: when people are learning foreign languages, the errors they make in pronunciation, word formation or sentence word order – even picking the wrong word meaning – are interpreted as errors in language. They are easily excused as the broken language of a learner. Errors in pragmatics, however, are not seen as language errors. They reflect instead on the personality and identity of the speaker. So a person who makes a politeness error is less likely to be seen as a learner and more likely to be seen as rude.

I have to say that Pragmatics is my favorite source for story ideas. I hope this discussion has shown you why, and has given you some ideas for exploring pragmatics in your own story worlds.

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How pragmatics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
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How morphology can help you!

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Morphology is a fantasy and science fiction writer’s best friend.

Seriously. Why? Because everyone uses it, and I mean everyone, whether they know it or not. Every story that makes up a name for a group of people and then pluralizes it is using morphology. Every story that takes a nice-sounding made-up word and then adds on a suffix to make the name of a country or city is using it too.

Morphology is prefixes and suffixes (and infixes). It is the study of the tiny pieces of meaning that make up words. Each of these pieces is called a morpheme. Some morphemes are free, which means they can occur by themselves and still have meaning. Examples:

cat
do
blend

Yes, these are words. But not all words contain only a single morpheme. Most contain one or more bound morphemes, which are meaning units that can’t occur all on their own. Examples:

-s
re-
-er
-ness
anti-
-ville
-ia

So if we use these in combination we get words with one or morpheme, as follows:

cat+s=cats (2 morphemes)
good+ness=goodness (2 morphemes)
paint+er+s=painters (3 morphemes)
etc.

If you have a fantasy or science fiction language, I urge you to think through the morphemes you use. There are a ton of people out there who make plurals by adding -i, or who make names of countries by adding -ia. But you shouldn’t necessarily fall into the default pattern.

Think first about the feel you want your language to have. A choice like -i for plural is different from -s, which gives the word a slight foreign feel (because of its Latin roots), but it’s still very under the radar for readers. This can be a good thing. On the other hand, your language could potentially use any sound or combination of sounds in its repertoire to pluralize (or it might not pluralize at all!). Using an unusual pluralizing suffix might stand out at first, but if it’s supported by the surrounding text so that its meaning is unequivocal, it can make your language seem far more interesting. The same goes for -ia, which is if anything more standard than the pluralizing -i.

Remember also that your morphemes don’t have to have the same meanings as English words. In my work I don’t use plural morphemes, and I don’t use a morpheme that means “country,” but I do have one that means “place” and another that means “person.” Examples:

The capital city is named after a man named Pelisma, and the suffix -ra means “place.”
Pelisma + ra=Pelismara, the place of Pelisma.

The title of a city ruler is Alixi, which actually breaks down like this:
Alhi=one
-iks=most
-i=person
Alhi+iks+i=Alhiiksi, pronounced Alixi, or the firstmost person.

Morphology is a lot of fun, and when you create a system that makes sense, it shows in the story.

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How morphology can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 1 Comment »

How articulatory phonetics can help you!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Articulatory phonetics deals with how the human vocal tract creates sounds.

Knowing the principles of how the vocal tract works can help science fiction and fantasy writers to create languages that follow naturalistic patterns of pronunciation, thus making created languages that seem more natural.

One of the key assumptions in the following discussion is that we’re working with a species which, like humans, can perceive vibrations in the air (whether through ears and hearing or by other means like antennae). While this does restrict us somewhat, it still allows for a lot of possibilities.

Let me begin with a caveat before we begin our tour of the vocal tract. If you’ve never studied linguistics, this may appear complex – but it’s not as bad as it seems. Just because there are a lot of variables you can change about a language doesn’t mean you should go about trying to change them all. (more…)

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 2 Comments »

How linguistics can help you!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

This sequence of “How ____ can help you!” pieces concerns various areas of linguistics. These aren’t intended to be technical, or even introductory discussions of linguistics itself. They are short, practical pieces which relate linguistics topics to the use of created languages in science fiction and fantasy. Certainly they will be useful for people who are digging into creating an entire language that penetrates an science fiction or fantasy world. I hope they can also be helpful for those who are using minimal-penetration languages in science fiction and fantasy languages that consist mostly of names for people and places.

Here are some of the upcoming topics:

• Articulatory phonetics, a.k.a. how to match sounds to an alien physiology
• Morphology, a.k.a. how words are broken into smaller pieces of meaning
• Syntax, a.k.a. how sentences are put together
• Semantics, a.k.a. how meanings are structured
• Pragmatics, a.k.a. how language implies more than it “means”; how people define insincerity vs. politeness
• Sociolinguistics, a.k.a. how people use language for social purposes including drawing distinctions between social groups

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How linguistics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences.  Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines.  She  has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | Comments Off