Interview with Dennis Preston

Let me start with this: one of the things our field is indebted to you for is your pioneering work in perceptual dialectology. I’ve always wondered: was there a particular event that sparked your interest in all this?

I was hanging around with some geographers—once for my bad behavior in New York I was sent to be a visiting professor at the University of Hawai’i, and Derek Bickerton introduced me to some geographers. And we were sitting around drinking, and a guy said “You know what you really might be interested in? This little book by Gould and White called Mental Maps.” So I said “Yeah, I might.” And I read it, and I said, “hmm. These guys are really interested in what people think about geography, rather than where things really are.” And then of course, it immediately struck me that I’m interested in dialectology because I want to know where people sound different. And I said, “but what about all the attitudinal stuff? And the outcomes of understanding the attitudinal stuff if you knew where real people thought people sounded different?” So yeah, it happened one night, at a place called Momma’s on King Street in Honolulu.

So you just happened to be hanging around with them?

Right, yeah. And then to my disdain, after my having discovered this field, I discovered that my discovery like so many discoveries, post-dated some previous discoveries. And it was that that led to the first volume called Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, where I tried to make known to the world what had not been made known to me before, because I was a reader of neither Dutch, nor Japanese. There were two very interesting early perceptual sets of studies with a nice argument—you can’t ask people where they sound different, you have to ask them where they sound the same. In the late forties, early fifties—it was a wonderful interchange. And I hope I helped some people to understand the early motivation at work in the field by getting those things translated and getting them into a more general public. Especially the Japanese work—the Japanese work was very sophisticated, and almost none of it was available in English. There was one article in English and one in French before we translated it, and when I say “we” translated the Japanese stuff I mean my colleague Danny Long in Japan who is completely fluent in Japanese and a linguist.

Is there a direction that you hope this goes in? Is there something out there that hasn’t been done that you hope to see?

Well I like the newer perceptual work that looks at details. I’m thinking of some of Patricia Cukor-Avila’s work in Texas and her colleagues, where they ask [participants] to draw maps of where people twang and where people drawl. The more we identify the folk terminology, the better we can do any kind of folk linguistics. I’ve always had trouble with, how do you say to real people, “Draw boundaries around where . . .” and then what do you say? “Where people sound different? Talk different?” You can’t say speak different dialects, because then you move into sort of semi-technical terminology, and, as you well know, when you say dialect to most speakers of American English they immediately associate it with bad language. So you really can’t use what for you is an obvious technical term. And then there’s the whole business of social versus regional. Although very interestingly, when we did even the earliest maps, people still imposed social dialect as well as regional dialect. One of my favorites is an old map by a white kid in Chicago who says “Chicago—average speech for the normal person,” and draws a big circle around Chicago. Then he draws a circle around Detroit, and says “Black ’Fro Speech,” because of the high percentage of Blacks in Detroit. This is a kid from Chicago? Who obviously has some very strange ideas about the demographics of his own city. This is not ethnic cleansing, this is ethnic pruning: you just regard your own speech as the typical normal speech, and then looked abroad for stranger things. Those are kinds of subtleties in the extraction of data. And of course we’ve had some really interesting articles about the whole technical business of acquiring data. Alfred Lameli and some of his colleagues in Marburg, for example, showed I can’t even remember how many different styles: a completely blank map of Germany, a map of Germany’s large cities, a map of Germany with large and small cities, a map of Germany with major rivers, a topographical map of Germany, and then a combination of these on one map, and calculated the number of distinctions that people would make for dialect according to the kind of map presented. This is an interesting continuing problem, but they did very careful statistical work on it, and the truth was, there were some significant differences, but it didn’t make a lot of difference. But I don’t think you could do this for the US. If you gave people a completely blank map of the US, their knowledge of the location of states is obviously not as good as the German knowledge of the large political subdivisions. It’s simply bigger than Germany.

What’s your take on these new technological systems coming into it?

Oh, the technological advances simply allow us to do what we wanted to do a long time ago. You remember that I worked with geographers in Ypsilanti [at Eastern Michigan University] and we devised some very clumsy system. I think we wrote some stuff in Basic, and we used a light pad to trace boundaries [from hand-drawn maps]. And now you can use any of these GIS systems to keep a perfect record of all of the demographics so that once you’ve finished the job, you can go in and say, show me the difference between men and women, with regard to the northern part of Indiana. It just allows you interpretative things that are amazing. I remember Philipp Stoeckle in the southwest of Germany has a wonderful perceptual map of where people believe the boundaries of certain elements were, which he then overlaid on an already existing map of the Protestant and Catholic areas of the region, and they almost perfectly matched [Montgomery & Stoeckle 2013]. Nobody had ever proposed that there would be a religious difference, and yet, there obviously was a preference, in terms of the perception of why speakers sound like they do. If you didn’t take religion into account in the demographics, then you sort of missed the boat. It’s a wonderful advantage for us. The one thing I regret, in a way, was not calling perceptual dialectology “folk dialectology.” And then I got to thinking about it—there is a perceptual dialectology within folk dialectology, but it has to do with the speech science perception of variety and uses more carefully controlled experimental methods. Obviously perceptual dialectology refers to folk perceptions not to professional perceptions, although I don’t know what professional perceptions are. I suppose a trained phonetician has a perceptual system that’s been added to in some way. But I think in the long run it should have been called folk dialectology, and then it’s simply one of the ways of getting the regard, the attitudes, the beliefs that non-linguists have about language in general. It’s just a label game. I remember when the people at the International Applied Linguistics Association wanted to start an applied folk linguistics section, people fought tooth and nail, especially the Europeans, because “folk” in European languages refers to people in lederhosen, slapping their knees, dancing around and scratching old hound dogs, whatever the real folk do. And I said, “well, let’s just go with modern folklorists, who say that everybody is a folk, and that people are simply not folk only when they are in certain professional, theoretical, trained contexts.” And I think we helped that along. I think now people who do folk linguistics no longer think of going to the boondocks to discover the folk. I hope they just think of going out on the street.

In the course of your several decades-long career, you’ve no doubt given thousands of presentations: Is there one core thing that you hope people walk away from your talks or lectures or classes with?

That’s a very interesting question; I don’t think I’ve thought about it very much before, but I guess I would say this: of course I want them to understand whatever experimental result or interpretation I give to them, but in some ways, now that you make me think about it, I want them most of all to understand what motivates me to do what I did. In some ways, if you think about it, if people understand why you did what you did, they’re really on their way to understanding whatever it is that you did do. Because otherwise, you’re very likely to end up with the “So what?” And “So what” just makes me feel very bad. Why would anybody do that, right? It’s sort of like going out into the real world, and you sort of say “well, I’m a linguist” knowing that some kind of conversation is going to follow that, and it could very easily end up in a “so what.” So that’s a motivation that has kind of been subconscious, but now in your very clever way, you have brought it to the surface.

Do you think your motivation has changed over your career?

Oh, I think yeah, inevitably, inevitably it does. Because when you are a young scholar, a great deal of your motivation is to do all of the things that are imposed on you by the sort of bureaucratic and administrative and even scientific contours of the field. You want to publish stuff that’s respected, you want to make enough presentations so that you’re promoted, and made a person who has status in your field. And I think once you get to be an old codger like me, you think much less about doing that, I guess, if you regard yourself as having been mildly successful. So I think my motivation for things like having people appreciate what I do and understand what I do is stronger and more recent than some of the unavoidable motivations that affect you as a younger scholar. And I think, also when you are younger, you probably monitor more heavily for innovation. I still like new stuff, in spite of my advancing age, but I think you sort of keep your finger on the pulse of where things are going to make sure you don’t miss an important turn in the field. I remember once, a very early grant I sent in got a review that said, “Well, he can’t do any stuff like that—he’s just a dialectologist.” And I thought to myself, “just a dialectologist?” Just because Fred Cassidy trained me didn’t mean that I didn’t go through the linguistics department at [the University of] Wisconsin, and it didn’t mean that I didn’t keep up with what was emerging in sociolinguistics. But I still remember the phrase “just a dialectologist.” And now I’m much happier, and I sort of accept it as a badge of honor. Of course I’m a dialectologist, and I like being one, dammit.

I think in general “dialectologist” is not used as a negative label anymore. I don’t think people would use it disparagingly now.

Thank goodness for our friends Jack Chambers and Peter Trudgill, because, if you remember on the last page of their book Dialectology, there is a sentence which says “dialectology without sociolinguistics [at its core] is a relic” (1998:188). So I think there is a sense in which they made dialectology. And Bill Labov, of course, has also had a great deal to do with it, because he has a great deal of respect for traditional American dialectology—its findings, and the way it pushes you to do other stuff. So I think, yeah, you’re right. It’s no longer a shameful, taxonomic kind of badge that it might have been at one time. I think it’s become respectable by its association with sociolinguistics. Look what’s happened to the American Dialect Society (ADS). [Early in the 1990s] we were dying, right? Ron Butters and I looked around one day, and we were the only ones that were even near fifty, and there were no younger people there. We still met with the Modern Language Association, and so he and I started an initiative to say, we need younger people, we need to pay attention to advances in methodology and in technology. We moved over to the LSA (Linguistic Society of America) [in 1995], and now, I think if you go to an ADS meeting, many people might go away shaking their heads and saying “That’s not dialectology, that’s sociolinguistics,” but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a proper integration of the two streams.

Yeah I think sociolinguistic methodology and technological advances made it much closer to sociolinguistics.

Well of course the heavy branches of early dialectology were lexicon and phonology. So the technological advances, in phonology in particular, have made the descriptions—well, a lot of us have gone crazy with vowel systems. I just love vowel systems. And the contrast of them all over the country—it’s just an amazing way to do work in the modern technological age.

It’s much different doing it with acoustic analysis versus aural analysis—even though of course people were very well-trained—it’s quite different.

Peter Ladefoged said to me at an LSA meeting shortly before he died, and I don’t know if you know or not but he was almost profoundly deaf in his late years, and he came down the hallway and saw me and smiled, and said “Hey! I’m a deaf phonetician!” Which, many years ago would have been just an absurdity. “God, what a loss, you can’t work in your field anymore.” But of course, now if you have eyes, you can do phonetics. You don’t need ears.

You’ve spent a lot of time talking to the public, too, not just students and colleagues. Do you change your message if you’re talking to the folk?

I think you have to. I’ve got a pretty good record of being asked to make public comment on linguistics—old time radio talk shows, and so forth. And you’ve got to be very careful. I find myself doing stupid things all the time: oh, if I had only said this in another way, there would have been more understanding. And this goes back to your first question—understanding the motivation for why we do what we do. For a while I had this kind of engineering-like approach to ordinary people. [To establish the relevance of our work] I’d say “Your car door wouldn’t open when you say ‘open’ if you say [aʷpən].” I thought that highlighting the practicality of what linguistics accomplishes in speech science, in forensic linguistics, was a good way to do this. But I feel a little embarrassed by this now. Those are not really the engaging reasons for why I do what I do in my field. I think you just have to be sensitive to the kind of interaction, and the ways that you can describe the meaning for yourself of what it is that you do. I know we live in a world where people want to see more direct benefits that affect them, but it’s awfully hard to do any kind of social or even hard science without referring to its general theoretical importance and background, and as you have suggested by this very question, that’s not an easy row to hoe.

I don’t know that the general public really cares about our theoretical or scientific motivations—they want to know why the door won’t open.

Well it’s more difficult for us [as linguists]. One of the LSA’s initiatives while I was chair of the Public Relations Committee, was to get more interesting linguistic research into general press releases and so forth. And I think that’s the better solution. “Look, we found out this—this is really interesting.” Maybe we don’t know exactly what to do with it right now, but that’s the way progress is made in the sciences. And of course with the general public you’re up against “Linguistics is a science?” There’s certainly no reason to repeat “Oh you’re a linguist? How many languages do you know?” or the other one: “Oh you’re a linguist, so I better watch how I talk.” But the general public’s understanding of science, even if you convince them that linguistics is one, still doesn’t guarantee that what you really want them to understand about what you do is there. This whole idea of public relations . . . is so important to linguistics—parents who are on school boards, legislators, and certainly the judiciary and trial judges and so forth need to know a lot of stuff we know about language. And if they don’t find it as having a scientific basis, then, obviously, they have less respect for it.

This makes me think about how everything has changed, with regard to technology, culture, politics, since we did Folk Linguistics. I’m thinking how different things would be if we were to go out and do some of those same interviews again.

That’s a really interesting question, and I’m caught between what Bill Labov would call the “Uniformitarian Principle,” which I sort of extend to culture and human beings in general over time, that is, the study of motivations and why people do what they do in a very general sense and of course, importantly in language, I think, changes superficially in some sense. So now we’ve got web-based social media, which people are trying to persuade us makes the whole business of human language interaction different. So I’m torn between the fact that there are interesting things to look at there, and the suspicion that the underlying motivations and principles of why we choose to do what we do may take different surface forms but are not basically very different. I’m still very prejudiced to face-to-face interaction. And when my students in beginning sociolinguistics courses say, “Oh, for my first paper I want to do a media study, I want to count this stuff”—and of course you’ve heard many of these and many of them are sophisticated and important—but I always say, “Okay, but for your second paper. For your first paper, you actually have to go out and do what I did: you have to go out and find real people and talk to them.” And I still think there’s a great deal of value in that, from a methodological point of view, simply because if you have that kind of interaction, there are things you can control. When you go back and look at somebody else’s interaction, it’s just there for you, right? Of course that doesn’t preclude web-based experiments where you set up things. I think of myself as an old-fashioned modernist.

Do you know this Lena Systems? This system that allegedly monitors how many words you say in a day so you make sure you talk enough to your baby? It’s total crap, and if I have a motivation, it’s getting rid of junk science things like Lena Systems. But it’s been endorsed by entire state school boards and politicians. I’m wondering what you think about people’s view that technology can help with language issues.

Well of course now there’s a sense in which the technology is trying to guide you in your linguistic behavior. And I have a kind of odd trust for most people that the linguistic behavior, the interaction that they have with children, is a by-product of cultural factors and the way they were raised. I think of some of the remarkable studies on language acquisition and the role of caregivers in different societies where correction and input and so forth are looked at very, very differently. So the idea that just a word count is going to be a solution to neuro-syntactic, neuro-lexical, neuro-phonological development just leaves me sort of panting. I have no doubt that exposure to certain kinds of linguistic matters is absolutely essential for the acquisition of a human language. Nobody who ever believed in any kind of innateness in human language ever believed that it could be triggered without input. But the question of sufficient input and type of input are really knotty problems, and yet these very knotty and complex problems come down to this unbelievably simple solution: give these kids a lot more words and everything is going to go better. So yeah, I also despair, of some of the importation, of what I take not to be serious linguistic findings, but findings by people in—I don’t want to mention other fields, but they’re findings which simply don’t have their foundations in linguistics, and it’s hard to take. It’s sort of like opening up a page on the web where somebody will fix your dialect, as if I didn’t want to sound like someone from Louisville (/lolvɪl/) Kentucky. Well, they can go to hell—it’s (/lolvɪl/, not /luəsvɪl/ or /luivɪl/ or whatever in the hell they might want me to say.

I’ve gone to some of these conferences where the Lena people are and I’ve asked “What are you counting as a word, even?” And it turns out that if it’s in the dictionary, it’s a word. So when Black kids say “finna,” that’s not a word because it’s not in the dictionary. So they claim Black kids and parents don’t say as many words.

Not being able to count Black kids’ words reminds me of the famous old experiments done at the University of Chicago by psychologists who went to ghetto areas and concluded that, because of ghettoization, that these children were so involved with the humdrum and necessary activities of daily life that they could not imagine, that they could not hypothesize. And this is because they looked through transcripts of interviews of these children, and did not discover the word if. Anyone who knows anything about African American English grammar will see immediately that there’s a perfectly reasonable syntactic alternative to if-like constructions. Which means that these kids are not hypothesis-free: they hypothesize and wish and hope just like any other kids. Such things very often come from the margins of our field. I mentioned earlier people in education, people in public life, and even parents who have children that they hope that they’re raising in an appropriate linguistic manner, need better information from us, and it’s hard to give, because, like any science, for us to distill it—I wish we had a science like astronomy, so that Neil deGrasse Tyson could emerge from one of us and, as Carl Sagan did years ago, explain the cosmos in ways that gripped the imagination. But I think the Big Bang theory and astronomical observations are a good deal easier than human language.

By the way did you hear what Neil deGrasse Tyson said about linguists?

Yes, unfortunately. But it’s a very good illustration of the fact that the public relations we need are not only outside the academy, but also inside the academy.

And he’s a smart guy, so if he says linguists can’t do that [figure out alien languages as in the movie Arrival] then everyone believes him.

Well I’m going to go around giving lectures on astronomy.

So this leads into the next question: I guess you do feel that linguists can contribute to these current, big-picture events.

I think there’s no doubt about it. Language and social life from any point of view can be enhanced by the understanding that linguists have about language and interaction and language and social life. And as sociolinguists we know this better than anybody else. The problem with us sociolinguists is that we sometimes get so immersed in the low-level statistical probabilities of this item arising from our system of linguistic choices that we overlook the outer edges of sociolinguistics. What does sociopragmatics mean? It addresses some of these questions of human interaction and how people deceive one another linguistically very directly.

And maybe that’s what the public can grab onto a little bit better than us counting how many times this particular variant occurs.

Well, I don’t want to diminish the work of sociophoneticians because both of us have done a hell of a lot of it. But there’s some ways in which showing a chart of a vowel system and having to explain it is a little less germane to daily lives of people than throwing up a conversation and showing how things went wrong, what kind of argumentation devices people used. In fact I’m unhappy that the collocation sociopragmatics is a rare one. I just don’t hear anybody talking about sociopragmatics. And then a lot of people would jump up and say, “Oh well that’s discourse or conversation analysis.” Well, conversation analysis is in the sociological field. Discourse analysis had been more seriously done by people who have good linguistics backgrounds, and I think you can see the difference. They bring pragmatic sophistication, structural sophistication into the work they do. So I would like to see both discourse analysis and conversation analysis subsumed in a way by the notion of “sociopragmatics.” You heard it here.

Another reason that the field in general, and lots of us in particular are indebted to you, is your invaluable mentorship. What causes someone to do this?

First of all if you’re committed to your field, then you’re committed to mentoring. Because if you’re only in your field for what it brings to you, and you have no idea that this field is worth something and should continue, then of course you might not feel interested in mentoring. But I feel very differently about the field, as some stuff we’ve already talked about shows. But the other thing is purely selfish. Mentoring is learning; mentoring is not just teaching. I can’t even imagine how much I’ve learned by working with students, and I mean students at all levels. I hardly ever mentor somebody and work with them on their projects, where they don’t need to know something that I don’t know and then I have to go out and learn it, and perhaps equally as often they have an insight or an interpretation or way to do something or question to ask—so the selfish end to doing good mentoring is, if you want to advance your own work and your own research, you should do it, because it’s a wonderful opportunity for you to learn stuff. And that’s all there is to that.

Do you think the particulars of your linguistic upbringing—speaking a nonstandard US dialect, having bilingual parents—contributed to you becoming a linguist?

Just my father was bilingual. My mother is a Scots-Irish hillbilly from western Kentucky. The only thing similar to my two sets of grandparents was that both of my grandfathers were coal-miners. My paternal grandparents were from a small village near Eger near the Slovak border, and probably even our name—you know that Preston is phony—it came out of the dictionary—our name is probably from a Polish town that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so there were Hungarians there, but it was within what would be the modern boundaries of Poland. And so Pekelnicky is probably from the small Polish town of Piekielnik, in the south of Poland. That’s the only decent etymology that I’ve ever seen. So certainly knowing childhood Hungarian had a lot to do with attitudes towards cultural, and obviously later linguistic pluralism. Speaking the English of the Louisville, Kentucky, area, though, had very little influence on me until I was much older. A child being from Louisville, but not leaving Louisville very much except for just short trips here and there, my language was never commented on. And then I remember I took a California trip when I was about sixteen or seventeen, and on the way back we took that nice cross-country train—you used to ride trains in the old days, right? Which were supported by the government? At any rate, some people from strange places like Michigan, and Connecticut and so forth started calling me Tex, because of the way I sounded. And I said “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not from Texas. I’m from right around Louisville, Kentucky,” and they go “Oh, ho ho, Kentucky, that’s where Lil Abner is from.” So I did by the time I was sixteen realize that the variety that I spoke was not exactly prestigious in the North. So I think the multiculturalism, multilingualism, then as an old child or young man, whatever the hell you are at sixteen—it certainly had an influence if not on doing my career in linguistics, certainly on my attitude to languages, and then I think eventually within my linguistics career, probably had something to do with the shape, the focus—both the focus on second language acquisition (SLA), and certainly sociolinguistics.

The melding that you’ve made of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics seems so natural, but I’ve always wondered why it seems that the two fields don’t talk to each other.

There was a time when Doug Adamson and Bob Bayley and certainly Elaine Tarone and others, who did early work especially between the variationist model and explanation for the variation in second language acquisition or variation in interlanguage, whatever you want to call it seemed very promising, but for some reason it never attracted the mainstream scholars in SLA. Part of this was I think their split. There was an overwhelming generativist side, and then there was an overwhelming sort of construction grammar, functionalist side. And sociolinguistics didn’t seem to fit very easily into either one. Although certainly the earliest sociolinguistic theory was completely compatible, especially with generative theory. But the idea that you could have choice in linguistics and not have choice among so-called competing grammars to the early Chomskyans—well, now they’re all over variation and they have conferences about variation in generative grammar, but this has never seemed to filter over into mainstream SLA theory or research. In fact Bob Bayley and I are planning a new update to Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation because we haven’t done one for several years, and we sort of keep hoping. There are articles that occur from time to time that use this model of investigation of a developing interlanguage, but you’re right. It just seems that the notion of variation and change, and especially the kind of rapid change in a so-called developing interlanguage—we ought to be just natural bedfellows, but it’s never been robust. And it’s always been kind of a mystery to me. Maybe it’s because so much of second language acquisition related to language teaching just completely downplayed the influence of linguistics. Look at the national TESOL organization. There used to be a linguistics subgroup—I think I was even chair of it for a year or two, but if you go to a massive TESOL conference today, and mention linguistics, they all kind of scoff at you. They don’t care about it anymore. Their pedagogical studies are of course sophisticated, but they’re not really rooted in serious linguistics work. Now the people in second language acquisition, that is, outside the pedagogical field, many of them have very good linguistics training, but as I said earlier, they seem to come from camps, where sociolinguistics just doesn’t fit in with them very well.

Yeah that’s where this question comes from. I’ve been told so many times by SLA or TESOL scholars that sociolinguistics has nothing to do with it. It’s totally separate.

Well if they’d like to see a sophisticated model of how you get from having one stage of a language to another, which applies to individuals, especially in current sociolinguistic work, where we’re talking about language change across the lifespan, well, for heaven’s sake what is second language acquisition except language change which happened to you during your lifespan? So I think the models are relevant, but the impetus to do this still seems weak to me.

Okay you brought this up, so . . . you consider yourself a generativist, and I consider myself a functionalist. But from my perspective, maybe it’s the functional perspective, it seems these differences are getting smaller. Is that the formalist perspective?

Well, I’ve never been satisfied, or it hasn’t been presented to me yet, within the cognitive linguistics domain, what I would consider, reasonable accounts of structure. The work that I do which looks at structured patterned stuff in linguistic behavior—I wouldn’t say that I’m a generativist—if I am a generativist, I’m a very superficial one because I do not jump from the model of the explanation of the structural composition of let’s say a sentence or a phrase or even a phonological phrase [to saying] that these things are buried in a language device in the brain. That to me is just an argument—it’s a game that I don’t play. So when I say that I’m a generativist I mean that I’m attracted to some of the accounts of structure, but not necessarily the neurolinguistic or psycholinguistic accounts of the structure. In the same way, when people appeal to certain factors and say that this prepositional phrase has this shape because, look at this box, and here’s how you go into the box and out of it, and the same reasoning for going in and out of the box is the same reasoning that gives you these prepositional forms. I’m not convinced by that, any more than I’m convinced that there’s a language acquisition and/or performance device. So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not really in the game of matching the research work that I do to what I consider to be these very deep theoretical questions of how language is in the brain, but I do know this: it’s organized, it’s not disorganized, and I think I would also say this, to push me slightly away from the functionalist position: I don’t believe that it’s memorized and analogized. Memorization and analogy are very strong and important processes, but I think they will not get you to the level of generalization that I see in the kind of structural things that I investigate.

So where do you think the structure comes from, then?

Well the structure comes from the complexity of the desire for communication, which any functionalist would agree with. And so what limitations [are there] on the kinds of things that can be done, on the one hand, which is a sort of a deep question—what’s going on in the brain? As opposed to, what do these structures do themselves, and [through] their relationship to one another, to show their complexity, without necessarily saying, aha, to have this kind of complexity then you’ve got to have this kind of either neural or real world cognitive explanation. And neither one of them seem fully convincing to me. I’m sort of not satisfied with ultimate explanations, and my guess is, like much in human behavior, that the ultimate explanation is going to be a very very complex one. This is where I really part company with the generativists. The ultimate explanation is not going to be simple; it’s not going to be that there’s a little terwilliger up there in your brain which makes you do this or that. There’s going to be complex interactions of [the kind that] cognitivists would be happy with, right? About space and time and shape and motion, which are undoubtedly playing a role in the development of, and probably the continuation and change in human languages. But since I didn’t do that for my life’s work, then people can’t force me to think very deeply about it. So at best I would be considered to be a very superficial generativist, and some of the things I’ve said about frequency and so forth would just make some of them downright angry.

Hmmm. Okay. I think maybe the cocktails later will clear this up. Do you remember saying [during a personal conversation] that the difference between sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics was +/- refrigeration?

Yes. I remember saying that. And it seemed true to me at one time. Now, not linguistic anthropology, but anthropological linguistics, that is, the interpretation of why people say the things they do, [which] appeals to things like ideology and so forth, and when I said that that was almost true. To do anthropological linguistic work you had to go somewhere. And then all of a sudden little crummy ideas like urban anthropology, which at first sounded like an oxymoron; oh no, you have to go discover a group that’s never had their language looked at before! Why would you go to the inner city, where lots of work has been done? But all of a sudden, this kind of new wave in anthropology, some of which did not bear fruit, some of which became anecdotal anthropology, where you could get a PhD in anthropology by going out and hanging with a bunch of people different from you and writing a novel. If you want to write a novel you should go to an English department, not to an anthropology department. Because I believe in structure, in the study of cultural systems, in the same way that I believe in it in the study of phonology or grammar. And this is why the anthropological notion of linguistic ideology appeals to me. Because it suggests that you don’t just have a set of beliefs, ideas, folk notions, and so forth, but that they are related to one another, in an even deeply, more cognitive way, and that you can begin to discover structures of belief, rather than just saying “oh well, if you play this noise for somebody then they vomit or they have a really good opinion of you.” Then the reasoning is all the way up, rather than down: since the person is an X, and sounds like an X, then the attitude from this teeny little part must be that. We need people like Judith Irvine and Susan Gal and others, who say you need to put all these pieces together, as well as a structured account of the cultural evidence. So I’m with these guys. I’m even with them in some of their more strikingly difficult representations like those that Michael Silverstein has proposed for indexicality, which, although difficult to read and figure out, make a great deal of sense to me. In fact, a couple papers that I’ve written have tried to be clarifications of the points about what it is that people know about language and why they talk about certain kinds of things as opposed to other things. To put some meat on the bones of a statement like salience. Salience is obviously something that rises because of some kind of cultural idea of the speaker, the situation, and so forth. The only salient sounds I can think of are sounds that are so rare that you might just jump. The first time that people hear Khoisan or Nguni clicks they go “Whoa! What’s that?” Maybe voiceless l’s in languages like Welsh or Tibetan. But other than that, salience seems to me a purely culturally triggered thing. And I think, as you and I both believe, most of what goes under the name of language attitude is actually, at least in its origin, derived from attitudes to social groups, and only after that transfer do language practices themselves point back to the groups and the beliefs about them. And the language stuff, which is even in some people’s minds divorced from the socio-political reality of the people it’s associated with—we lose track of this over time. That’s the stuff that just ends up being bad language. Although there may be racist and elitist connections to it in some cases, in some other cases it simply belongs to this ideological tradition, the language correctness tradition that Lesley and Jim Milroy have written so nicely about.

Here’s an easy one for you: tell me about the attitudinal cognitorium.

The “attitudinal cognitorium” (AC). I’ve actually forgotten the name of the person who made up that label. I stole it from the Handbook of Attitudes (Albarracín, Johnson & Zanna 2005), where the AC was really fleshed out in a chapter by Brown and Bassili. A very interesting handbook, by the way. When I got this nearly a thousand page handbook, I flipped to the index, and this massive handbook did not have the words language or speech anywhere in the index. So then of course I went to the bibliography, and first I went to the l’s, of course, where I looked for Wally Lambert. Wally Lambert was not there. Then I went to the g’s, of course, Howard Giles was not there. So here it pretended to be a handbook—an up-to-date current survey of the field of attitudes, and language [merited] not one damn mention in the whole thing. At any rate, there was very interesting stuff about attitudes, and Bassili and Brown laid out for me what was a very plausible kind of cognitive construct. And in it it takes care of the occasionally objectionable idea “Well how can you believe this, and then believe completely the opposite?” Well, all cognitive psychologists tell us that all those things are in there. And that given certain kinds of conditions, some will emerge, and then some will emerge at another time. And on rare occasions, where both of them get triggered, and you have this so-called cognitive dissonance. So this idea, that through experience we form a number of associations, language and people associations, and then we sometimes assign values to them, and given the presence of that form, whether experimentally or in the real world, we run off into our attitudinal cognitorium, an unabashedly kind of connectionist network, and they surface. And then we got a whole bunch of other devices; they [people and language associations] surface, and how we treat them, well, we don’t say them explicitly sometimes, because we’re guarded by things like appropriate social behavior, although the stuff is still welling up in our minds. And sometimes we take overt action, either in speech—folk linguistics—or in behavior—to ignore a person, to be rude to a person, to be overly polite to a person, to accept a person into certain kinds of company, and so forth. Actually when you look at the models of an attitudinal cognitorium, they’re very complex, but there is a simplicity to it: that the stuff is there, that it’s available for awakening, and this is something that is often ignored in some of the even careful, explicit work, and some implicit designs which are so favored now, by experimental social psychologists. Well, I’m very fond of those. But as you know I’m also very fond of the fact that linguists have tools, especially relatively formal pragmatic tools, that allow us to see presuppositions, and all kinds of stuff that goes on in behavior. My student Elena Rogers is just doing some spectacular work. She’s worked with little groups of students, of respondents all from Oklahoma, and she engages them in discussions about Oklahoma’s language. And they go on and on, they interrupt one another, they contradict one another, they state things as facts, but then they also presuppose as preconditions stuff that she’s been able to tease out of these interactions. And in some cases, I would say, that experimental work, which imposes tasks, labels, and everything else from the researcher’s point of view, is in some ways, suspicious, or at least, incomplete, until you also engage people in discourse about the thing that you want to find out about. Of course the IAT [implicit attitudes test] people are unhappy with this, because they say, “how do you get any implicit stuff if people are talking about it?” That’s when linguists should jump up and say, “you know we got this field pragmatics, we see implicit stuff in language all the time, especially in interactive behavior.” That’s why I mentioned, much earlier in this conversation, that I wish sociopragmatics was a more frequent collocation.

Well this might be a good time to ask about the direction that you see the field going in, either linguistics in general or sociolinguistics in particular. And do you think it’s going in the right direction?

I think things are in fairly good condition. We have, as we mentioned earlier, all of the cool new toys and technologies that we can play with—the eye-tracking stuff that we’re doing on dialect grammars. So there’s plenty of new stuff advancing the field. So then the question is not, do we have the tools to do it, but what are we looking for? Now, I just got through saying that I was very much for the investigation of interaction and discourse, and things like group talk as a way into looking at not just what an attitude is, but how it’s constructed in ongoing talk. And we have the tools to do this. But I sometimes worry about the introduction of what I would call so-called discourse or conversation analysis, because they seem to me to be collections of what people said, and then, seat of the pants interpretations of those. Well, they’re a paraphrase of what people already said. So when people say things, then I worry about people constructing a story about what was said, and I know about intersubjectivity, familiarity and lack of familiarity, so that you can say “well, when people say things like this within my cultural environment, it means this.” And I’m less happy with that kind of analysis than that which says “let’s look at this interaction, where what was asserted was this, what was presupposed was this,” and I’m even appreciative of, well, people were overlapping here and other kinds of things that come out of an interactional analysis. But I’m a little leery of the recent discourse bug. It seems to me that the discourse bug has bit almost everybody. But I think as linguists we need to guard against discourse analysis as a paraphrase of what somebody said. And maybe even more seriously for sociolinguists. Because if it’s a paraphrase of what somebody said, about racism, about politics, about education, about other areas, then we don’t want to go on the air and say, “We have found that. . . .” What we want to do is go on the air and say, “You know our analytic tools are such that allow us to talk about this, or that kind of stuff, and here’s what we’ve learned from these situations.” But I think in general, all you have to do is go to meetings, and [you’ll] see what a robust field we’ve become. It was the case, not so many years ago, that when you went to the LSA, there was one sociolinguistic session, on Sunday morning, after lots of people had left. Now luckily, when ADS started to meet with LSA, then the number of sociolinguistic presentations picked up. Because ADS embraced sociolinguistics. But now, LSA has also embraced sociolinguistics, so all of a sudden you go to LSA, and you now not only have the option of other things you need to know about phonetics, or semantics, or syntax, or whatever else you need to know about, you actually get to focus on those things within your own subdiscipline. And now, an alarming richness. You see it at the poster session, you see it in special sessions, and regular sessions. So there’s no longer just sociolinguistics one and two on Sunday morning, so I’m happy about that. I think the field has much more solidly planted itself within general linguistics. You wouldn’t think of having a general linguistics conference with no sociolinguistics—that would just be unthinkable.

Do you think sociophonetics had a role in that?

I think sociophonetics was a nice way to convince hard-nosed linguists at one end of the spectrum that we were not just fooling around. That our representations of phonetic detail, and especially the acoustic detail as we related it to social factors, yes, played an interesting role. And of course we had colleagues outside who became [interested in our work]—well I think of Pam Beddor at University of Michigan. Very very early on, even though her perceptual work in phonetics often relied on nonsense syllables, she realized the connection between this careful acoustic work and sociophonetics. And so she and others helped us make this breakthrough.

I think of the contribution that sociolinguistics and sociophonetics had to speech perception itself. I’m thrilled about how mainstream speech perception people are paying attention to what we’re doing over here.

Well, you know my favorite phrase is that the brain gets in the way of your ear. So things happen to you for ideographical, demographic, or interactional reasons that make your processing of speech not a simple decoding of the sort of online stuff that’s presented to your ear. And you’re right, people outside of attitudinal sociophonetics or whatever you want to call it are beginning to realize that perceptual strategies are not simple renderings of acoustic signals, that they’re complex, and it’s interesting to see how this is expanding into areas outside of sociophonetics and also into sociolinguistic descriptions of grammar and even word interpretation. Where things are clearly being guided by processing mechanisms which some linguists would call extralinguistic. But, as Greg Guy would say, what’s extralinguistic about things that have an influence on linguistic organization, behavior, perception? There’s nothing extralinguistic about them. If you want to build a general theory of language, in which you don’t care just about some low-level physiological features, if you want build a general theory of language, I’m afraid that I have to say that sociolinguistic facts can’t be ignored. If you don’t include them, you don’t have a general theory of language.

Okay! My last question is about [your wife] Carol. How did you convince her to become a sociolinguist?

Well remember, although Carol downplays it, her master’s in TESOL, from Georgetown, was done at a time when everybody who went through TESOL did responsible linguistics work. So she studied with Roger Shuy, she studied with Father Dinneen, she did morphology, syntax, phonology, so she’s got a good linguistics background. That’s one fact about her. Plus, she’s had interesting life experiences; there she was, in what was called British Honduras, now Belize, very very early in her career, before her training at Georgetown, where she was exposed to local varieties of English, and the Belizean Creole itself, as well as local Spanish, which she’s quite fluent in, so she had many interesting linguistic experiences. And then of course I whisked her away to Poland, and I have to say that her Polish language production is not very good, but her comprehension is very good. I mention things to her in Polish all the time and amazingly, she understands what I have to say. But that’s not her major influence. Her major influence is that she is just an incredibly wonderful sounding board for everything that I write, and everything that I present. She’s a spectacularly good editor, but she’s not like a prescriptivist editor, who tells you to move this here or there, because of her own linguistic training. And because of her keeping up in the field, when we go to conferences, she doesn’t go on vacation, she goes to papers, and so she hears this stuff. So when I say something stupid, and unfortunately this is frequently, and especially when I say something unintelligible, she says, “Wait a minute. Somebody’s not going to understand that, for this reason.” And if I can make an argument, well even though you’re a good linguist, you’re not a specialist in this, and if I have to go through that routine to convince her, very often I say, “Oh, you know, you’re right, I should just do this in a different way.” She and Brian Joseph and I edited a volume, and she was a big part of that. And I won’t mention any names, but I’ve done quite a lot of editorial work, well, you and I have done editorial work together, A Reader in Sociophonetics, and I have to say that some persons who have some prestige in the field, have done much better, by having Carol Preston look at their chapters or their articles before they appeared. Putting aside the fact that she’s my best friend, and that we love each other, she’s my best friend in a way that’s just been unbelievably helpful in my career, and for my productivity.

Whew. Dang. Finally, do want to go on record with your [claim that your speech illustrates] Standard American English vowels?

I still have those vowels. And I checked myself the other day. I in fact lay right on top of [the mean positions for the American English vowels reported by] Peterson and Barney (1952). Now here’s the problem. Everybody knows that I have southern-colored speech, but if you look at the southern coloration of my speech, it’s the things that Peterson and Barney didn’t care about. Peterson and Barney did not study the word house, which I do as [hæws]. That’s clearly southern. Peterson and Barney had nothing to do with pin/pen conflation before nasals. I do. Peterson and Barney had nothing to do with the horse/hoarse distinction, which I have and almost no other living speaker has. But the preservation of that is southern. So I do all kinds of southern things that don’t show up in Peterson and Barney. On the other hand I don’t do some southern things, which would immediately contradict Peterson and Barney. I’m too old, and I’m too far north to have a great deal of back-vowel fronting. So southerners are going to say things like [mʉv] (move), and instead, I say [muv]. I have a perfectly good /u/ vowel. The only fronting I hear in myself, and I’d have to look at it spectrographically again, especially after coming to Oklahoma after living in Michigan for so long—people in Oklahoma sound a lot like me, so they tempt me to sound more like what I used to sound like. And I think the strut-vowel, I’m fronting a little bit. Of course northern shifters back it, and you hear something [strɔt]-like, and I think I’m starting to say [strɜt], instead of [strʌt]-like, when I was right on top of Peterson and Barney. So my persistence in saying that I am a speaker of the Peterson and Barney vowels, doesn’t go beyond the Peterson and Barney vowels, where it is very clear that you can hear southern elements in my speech. And probably some even mild monophthongization on /ay/ in the appropriate environments. Funniest story about my completely standard American English vowels is I said it this one time, and Bill Labov jumped up in the audience and said “Me too! I’ve got them too!” Bill Labov? From New Jersey? Has got standard American English vowels? I’ve always teased him about this and he always says “No, I got ’em, I got ’em.” But of course he doesn’t.

Well, I’m not going to make that claim. Well, do you have anything else you’d like to add?

Gosh I don’t know. It seems to me like we’ve covered a lot of territory here. If I said anything else it probably wouldn’t be the right thing to say. Except I must add at the end of this, that you only asked about my mentoring and you didn’t ask about my collaboration with colleagues. And I’ve collaborated with many wonderful colleagues over the years. In fact I would hate to start running them out. When I was a very young man Roger Shuy invited me to edit and do some work with him, and I worked with Bob Bayley on a number of projects on sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. But the most important colleague is the person that I also had a small hand in mentoring, and that’s you. Our publication of Folk Linguistics was in fact subfield-setting. The same way that you don’t go to a conference and hear nothing about sociolinguistics, you don’t go to certainly a sociolinguistics conference unless there’s a large whack of folk linguistics in it. And of course you were very much responsible for the collection and interpretation in the early days. So if we finish this interview without mentioning the fact that you are not just my student and my friend but also an important intellectual collaborator, then I would be personally and intellectually false.

I can’t even respond. Oh, geez Dennis.