International Linguistic Association

Meetings

Kathryn English, Université de Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Ecole Polytechnique

What They Mean by What They Don’t Say.
Managing Assumptive Frameworks Across Continents

Common knowledge suggests that the Internet has made it easier than ever to bring far-flung communities together. The web, Skype, SMS, twitter, and e-mail on iPhones seemingly all converge into one instantaneously happy family. All the same, it remains fairly daunting to fully understand what a person means by what he or she does not say if he or she actually comes from that faraway place. Even more, it can at times be totally baffling to decrypt what he or she really means when familiar sounding words are spelt out verbatim. Now, although many users express themselves in either their local language or English as a lingua franca do they actually mean what they say? In this talk I will explore some characteristics of both English and French that emerge when meaning is negotiated across different cultures. More specifically, this includes the French exception culturelle, or aspects of life a French public take for granted but which need to be made more explicit to the world at large.

In the first part some Franco-American data from the Cultura Project¹ in which students wrote in their mother tongues will be presented. I will then compare this data with Franco-Chinese interactions from the CANDLE II² project where students wrote in English as a Lingua Franca.

In a final part I hope to provide some insights into teaching English in France and how the perception of English is changing now that non-native speakers outnumber the native speakers of English.
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¹ The Cultura Project is an internet-based, cross-cultural, co-operative language learning project developed by Gilbert Furstenberg at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in coordination with the Institut National des Télécommunications, the Université de Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and the Ecole Polytechnique from 1997 to 2007.  In this project students wrote assignments in their mother tongues (source language, i.e. English for the American students, French for the French students) and read what their partners wrote in the target language (French for Americans learning French and English for the French students).  Meanings were negotiated across cultures and across languages.

For a full description of the Cultura Project : http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num1/furstenberg/default.html  (or) http://web.mit.edu/french/culturaNEH/

² CANDLE II (for Corpus and NLP for Digital Learning of English) is managed by Dr Meei-Ling Liaw, Department of English, National Taichung University, Taiwan.  Students in Taiwan work with students in France, using English as a common language.

http://candle.ntcu.edu.tw:8080/drupal/

meeting announcement (please post)

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Upcoming Meetings:

October 9: Lawrence M. Solan, Brooklyn Law School

November 13: Kamal K. Sridhar, Stony Book University

December 11: Alice Deakins, William Paterson University

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