Discourse Pragmatics as a Means of Contact-Induced Change
Suzanne Wertheim

Department of Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley

 

            How do the social, cultural, and political backgrounds of minority-language speakers affect the way that they speak? And how does language as a social practice influence language as a system, such that, for example, a minority language becomes more like the dominant language with which it is in contact? This paper uses data from young urban ethnic Tatars, all Russian-Tatar bilinguals, to address these questions and to demonstrate that the code-mixing of discourse-pragmatic words is a previously unrecognized pathway of language influence and contact-induced change.

            The ethnographic and linguistic data presented here were gathered during a year of participant-observation fieldwork in Tatarstan, which is an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation. Tatar is a Turkic language found in Tatarstan and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union: currently there are approximately 1 million speakers of Tatar in Tatarstan, but like most minority languages in the Russian Federation, Tatar is a “contracting” language undergoing multi-generational language shift, and the number of speakers decreases each year. The speakers studied were bilingual Tatar youth (18-30) residing in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. They were all members of what I call the “Tatar Social Club”, and either nationalistically oriented or actively engaged in Tatar cultural activities. The data presented in this paper were taken only from Tatar-dominant speakers or balanced bilinguals. Additionally, all speakers quoted here have demonstrated a markedly pro-Tatar sociolinguistic stance: some choose ideology over communication and periodically refuse to accommodate for non-speakers of Tatar, and several have explicitly stated that they “never use Russian unless it is impossible to avoid,” thus violating sociolinguistic conventions of Tatar use.

Individual Tatar linguistic performance is set against a purist backdrop, with explicit ideals of “pure” and “literary” Tatar. “Pure” Tatar is “de-Russified” Tatar, and found at one extreme of a cline of language mixing. When the audience and setting require Tatar to be the language of conversation, but do not require a high level of verbal hygiene, young Tatars will use what I call “Tatar-preferred style”: while they are still filtering out Russian elements, these Russian elements are limited to content words, while Russian discourse-pragmatic words on the metalinguistic level of language are allowed to “sneak through.” Neither speakers nor listeners appear to be aware of these Russian words that are organizing and commenting on otherwise purely Tatar discourse, and they can even appear (to a much lesser extent), in the highly performed “pure” Tatar style. This code-mixing is particularly interesting because it is found in the speech of even the most culturally and politically active young Tatars I n Tatarstan, speakers who use Tatar in a variety of functional domains, including in professional and educational spheres.

The style-shifting and linguistic performance of the Tatars among whom I was a participant observer were directly affected by my presence or by the presence of my recording equipment, both of which often triggered such a high level of verbal hygiene and self-conscious performance that unconscious code-mixing did not take place. In order to obtain the widest range of data and examples of code-mixed Russian words, I used four methods of data collection: recordings of conversations; fieldnotes; e-mail; and an internet bulletin board. Data presented here are sentences, paragraphs, or stretches of Tatar discourse with embedded Russian words. When speaking or writing in “Tatar-preferred” style, young Tatars code-mix a negligible number of nouns and verbs (usually to fill lexical gaps); once these words are removed from consideration, it can be seen that all of the remaining Russian words code-mixed in otherwise Tatar discourse have discourse-pragmatic function, and polysemous Russian words that have been grammaticalized will only be used in their discourse-pragmatic functions. These words are not limited to the set of words commonly known as “discourse markers” and all of them are accounted for in some way by at least one of the discourse and pragmatic typologies current in the literature. Here they have been grouped into three functional categories: (1) markers of discourse structure and force (e.g., no ‘however’, chto ‘that’), (2) interactional performatives (e.g., privyet ‘hi’, izvinite ‘excuse me’), and (3) evaluatives (e.g., zhalko ‘it’s a shame’, naverno ‘probably’). Many of these Russian discourse-pragmatic words retain their Russian grammatical requirements when they are code-mixed into otherwise Tatar discourse such that what is produced is a composite grammar; although a stretch of discourse will only have a few code-mixed Russian words, this discourse may also exhibit Russian morphological, semantic, and syntactic patterns. The grammatical incursions brought into this style of Tatar linguistic performance include calques from Russian, changes in word order (e.g., Russian prepositions remain pre-head when code-mixed in Tatar even though Tatar is a postpositional language), and changes in the morphosyntax of coordination, subordination, and relativization. This metalinguistic language mixing and the lexical and structural alterations that go along with it indicate a pathway of language attrition and language influence that has not been described in other studies of language contact.