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Affinity of Saussurean Linguistics, World Englishes Paradigm, and Intercultural Communication Studies

Paper · 2024 · Zoya G. Proshina

Summary

This theoretical essay asks how three fields relate: Saussure's structural linguistics, the World Englishes (WE) paradigm, and Intercultural Communication Studies (ICC). Proshina argues that Saussure's theory was semiotic and not purely formal, covering form, meaning and use, and that this is why it could grow into sociolinguistics. She follows a line of influence from Saussure to Firth and Malinowski, and from them to Kachru, whose 1962 Edinburgh thesis described educated Indian English. She then reads Saussure's split between langue and parole through WE. In her account, new features first show up in the speech of educated users. They then become codified as norms and finally alter the system of a variety.

The method is conceptual argument supported by examples. These come from American English and from Asian and African Englishes, plus recent China Daily texts. The main claim is that WE and ICC depend on each other, because a variety cannot be understood without its culture. This matters for anyone handling English from many communities, where a word's sense, its connotations and naming conventions vary by variety.

Key points

  • Kachru studied under Firth and was later advised by Halliday. His 1962 PhD at Edinburgh treated "Educated Indian English" as the acrolectal top of a cline of bilingualism.
  • The proposed change path has four steps:
    1. Recurring deviations appear in educated oral speech.
    2. The same deviations appear in educated written speech.
    3. They are codified as a new norm.
    4. The variety's system changes.
  • The American English illustrations are:
    • regularised verbs (learned, dreamed);
    • have, need and dare behaving as ordinary verbs (Do you have…);
    • a simpler subjunctive;
    • I just ate used where British English prefers the present perfect.
  • In Outer Circle varieties, mass nouns take plurals (equipments, furnitures). In China Daily, port means a land checkpoint, as in "highway port" and "Horgos Railway Port".
  • Chinese personal names can be written family-first or given-first, which causes cataloguing and address errors. For the scholar Li Wei, the author settled the order by checking how he cites himself.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A repeated deviation shared by educated users is better treated as an emerging norm than as noise, so frequency across a community of competent writers can separate a variety feature from a mistake.
  • I2. Variety morphology such as countable equipments, furnitures or regularised past forms is systematic, not misspelled.
  • I3. A modifier can reveal a variety-specific sense: highway or railway before port shifts the meaning from a sea harbour to a land transit point.
  • I4. Understanding is layered: form, then meaning, then a pragmatic level that needs cultural background. A phrase like cultural revolution can mislead anyone who composes its meaning from its words.
  • I5. To resolve name order, a syllable-count heuristic (a one-syllable family name next to a two-syllable given name) can be combined with checking how the person refers to themselves.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): self-induced repair rules could first check whether a "parser error" recurs consistently in one variety's text, and then encode it as a dialect pattern rather than "fixing" it.
  • I2 (tokens): the lemmatizer and tagger in crate en could accept these forms, mapping equipments to lemma equipment with a plural feature and an annotation for the variety.
  • I3 (world): ontology sense selection could let a compound modifier override the default WordNet sense, giving the entity the type "land border station".
  • I4 (frames): named historical events and culture-loaded terms could be flagged as non-compositional, so the frame and connotation come from the knowledge graph and not from the head word.
  • I5 (world): entity resolution for Chinese person names could apply this heuristic and prefer self-attested forms when merging mentions such as "Li W." and "Wei L.".

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Lomonosov Moscow State UniversityMoscow · Russia14 works · 2,430 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksCommunication · 97 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Zoya G. Proshina. 2024. Affinity of Saussurean Linguistics, World Englishes Paradigm, and Intercultural Communication Studies. Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 21.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22363/2618-897x-2024-21-4-621-631

@inproceedings{proshina2024affinity,
  title = {{Affinity of Saussurean Linguistics, World Englishes Paradigm, and Intercultural Communication Studies}},
  author = {Zoya G. Proshina},
  booktitle = {Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 21},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.22363/2618-897x-2024-21-4-621-631},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897x-2024-21-4-621-631}
}

References

26 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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