Selection Nativelike Selection and Nativelike Fluency

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3.6.3 Nativelike Selection and Nativelike Fluency

We now want to turn our attention to the wider issue of how it is that young language learners manage to acquire the adult native speaker’s ability, not only to speak grammatically, but also to converse naturally and idiomatically. To be able to participate in conversational talk, they not only have to produce expressions which are readily understood by their hearers, they have to produce them spontaneously within a very short time span if they are to retain their attention. Their productions also have to be in line with the general flow of talk and be used to initiate, continue, or conclude a conversation as appropriate. Inappropriate contributions will be either ignored or censured. We have already indicated above that this is a tall order, and that one way of coping simultaneously with all these demands is to fall back on “prefabricated patterns” to save processing time and effort, and so make the encoding task easier. Pawley and Syder 1983 discuss in some detail the twin notions of “nativelike selection” and “nativelike fluency”. Selection has to do with idiomatic usage and fluency with the business of encoding speech and the manner of its production. We wish to summarize some of their main points under the two headings.

3.6.3.1 Selection

Nativelike selection is not just a matter of acquiring the syntactic rules of a language but also of acquiring a sense of native speaker preferences. According to Pawley and Syder, these preferences are based on a number of different, and often conflicting, principles. The first is that native speakers prefer the shortest and simplest of any grammatical alternatives. “The maxim goes something like this: to speak idiomatically, never use a phrase where a single word will do, and never use a complex sentence where a simple sentence will do” p. 197. Although there may be something in this suggestion, we can find many exceptions; Pawley and Syder state that: In everyday speech Do what I say and Do what I tell you are more common than the roughly synonymous Obey me, while He won’t do what he’s told is just as nativelike as He won’t obey orders, and That’s got nothing to do with it is as idiomatic as That’s irrelevant. 1983:197 The second involves a knowledge of conventional usage: Pawley and Syder cite existing conventions for telling the time in English, and why it is not correct to say It’s a third to six as an alternative for It’s twenty to six. The third has to do with a knowledge of speech act - 74 - theory and discourse context. For example, the expression I want to marry you is a ritual formula, appropriate as a serious proposal of marriage, but the roughly synonymous I wish to be wedded to you is too archaic to be taken seriously. While the fourth involves an understanding of discourse structure and its conventions: for example, in sentences which are unmarked for prominence, there is a preference for the topic given information to precede the comment new information. Another example of judgments about naturalness is the preference with a verb such as want for verbal complements rather than nominalizations, so that I want to marry you is more acceptable as a proposal than I want marriage with you. Pawley and Syder suggest that familiarity “will play some role in determining the native speaker’s judgments about the naturalness of a sentence or utterance” p. 199. They introduce the concepts of “memorized sentence” and “lexicalized sentence stem” as elements of linguistic knowledge which are important in fluent discourse and also in nativelike selection. A lexicalized sentence stem has a recurrent collocation, e.g. tell the truth, plus a grammatical frame, together with variable and optional constituents, realized as inflections and expansions. From the sentence stem: NP tell-TENSE the truth can be generated the following: Tell the truth Jo seldom tells the truth. I wish you had told me the truth see p. 211. A memorized sentence is recalled and produced as a whole; typical examples are: Can I come in? and It’s none of your business. Pawley and Syder note that people generally “are not good…at performing a number of different mental acts simultaneously or in rapid succession” pp. 217–218. Therefore, they suggest that “lexicalized sentence stems and other memorized strings form the main building blocks of fluent connected speech” p. 214. Such “holistically stored sequences” are quickly retrievable, they are familiar to speaker and hearer alike, and they provide convenient ways of referring to culturally salient concepts p. 218. Labov, in Labov and Waletzky 1967 and Labov 1972a, noted that the most effective narrators are those who are able to speak with great fluency and rhythm, using an extremely simple syntax in relating the “narrative action” of familiar events. This narrative action has probably been rehearsed many times and the most telling expressions memorized as wholes, so that they trip off the tongue apparently without effort or prior thought. Not only are the events themselves familiar, but also the language used to describe them. - 75 -

3.6.3.2 Fluency