Dissertation Research: Learning Variation: Language Acquisition and Socialization in St. Lucia

圣卢西亚儿童面临着一个复杂的社会语言环境，在这个环境中，他们接受高度可变的多语言输入。当他们获得语言时，他们必须学会控制多种变体或代码，包括法语词汇克里奥尔(Kweyol)，英语词汇克里奥尔的各种新兴形式，以及标准英语(ES)。在培养以实用和文化适当的方式使用这些不同变体的交际能力的过程中，这些儿童获得了很大程度的语言和社会文化变异的详细知识，并深入了解这两种变异顺序在圣卢西亚社会中是如何相互联系的。在这个过程中，他们学会了利用这些语言变体作为一种丰富的文化资源来阐述他们的新身份和协商各种类型的社会互动。这些发展过程将通过一项语言社会化研究来研究。语言习得过程将被纵向记录在六个不同社会背景的孩子身上。将定期录制儿童在各种自然环境中与不同对话者的言语互动。将与当地顾问合作，对这些录音进行详细的注释和转录，以便将录音放在人种学的背景下。语言习得过程将分析不同变体在每个儿童的言语环境中的使用程度，这些变体的不同结构特征，特定形式和变体之间的语用突显差异，以及它们使用的社会文化规范。这项研究将深入了解儿童如何在多语言环境中获得交际能力，以及语言变异知识及其索引和编码如何构成生活在克里奥尔社会的人的整体文化能力的重要组成部分。更广泛地说，这项研究将有助于从理论上理解多语言社区是如何构成和组织的；它将有助于深入了解个人如何理解他们的社会世界，以及他们如何使用语言来断言和管理他们在这些不同的(今天，越来越普遍的)环境中经常变化的身份。

St. Lucian children are confronted with a complex sociolinguistic environment in which they receive highly variable, multilingual input. As they acquire language they must learn to control multiple varieties or codes, including a French-lexicon creole (Kweyol), various emergent forms of English-lexicon creole, and "standard" English(es). In the course of developing the communicative competence to use these different varieties in pragmatically and culturally appropriate ways, these children acquire detailed knowledge of a great degree of both linguistic and sociocultural variation, as well as an intimate understanding of how these two orders of variation are interlinked in St. Lucian society. In the process, they learn to draw on these language varieties as a rich cultural resource for setting forth their emergent identities and negotiating various types of social interactions. These developmental processes will be investigated through a language socialization study. The language acquisition process will be longitudinally documented in six children of differing social backgrounds. Regular periodic audio recordings will be made of the children's speech interactions with various interlocutors in a variety of naturalistic settings. These recordings will be annotated in detail and transcribed in cooperation with local consultants so as to place the recorded utterances in ethnographic context. The course of language acquisition will be analyzed with regard to the extent to which different varieties are used in each child's verbal environment, the differing structural features of those varieties, the differences in pragmatic salience among particular forms and variants, and the sociocultural norms of their use. This research will yield insights into how children acquire communicative competence in multilingual settings, and how knowledge of linguistic variation and the social differentiation it indexes and encodes forms an essential part of the overall cultural competenc e of persons living in creole societies. More broadly, the study will contribute to theoretical understandings of how multilingual communities are constituted and organized; and it will provide insight into how individuals apprehend their social worlds and how they use language in asserting and managing their often shifting identities in these heterogeneous (and today, increasingly prevalent) settings.