Pidgin and Creoles

A pidgin is a language with no native speakers; it is no one language but is a contact language. It is the products of a multilingual situation in which a simple code of communication is a need. A pidgin is sometimes regarded as a ‘reduced’ variety of a ‘normal’ language, with the simplification of grammar and vocabulary of that language, considerable phonological variation, etc.  In contrast to a pidgin, a ‘creole’ is just a normal language in just about every sense. Like a normal language, creole has native speaker. But similar to pidgin, a creole has a complex relationship to the usually standardized language to which it is associated.

Pidgin and Creole arises from the basic needs that people who speak different language have to find common system of communication which is often known as lingua franca. UNESCO (1953) defines lingua franca as ‘a language which is used habitually by people whose mother tongue are different in order to facilitate communication between them’. A lingua franca can be spoken in a variety of ways. Not only is it spoken differently in places but also individual speakers vary widely in their ability to use the languages.

Language; Discourse and Text

Discourse

Originally the word 'discourse' comes from Latin 'discursus' which denoted 'conversation, speech'. According to some linguist, they have illustrated by the following definition: Discourse is a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25). On the other hand Dakowska, being aware of differences between kinds of discourses indicates the unity of communicative intentions as a vital element of each of them.
There are seven criteria which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a spoken text as a discourse has been suggested by Beaugrande (1981).

These include:
·    Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;
·    Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense.
·    Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;
·    Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;
·    Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;
·    Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;
·    Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata;

Nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research (Beaugrande 1981, cited in Renkema 2004:49).

3.2    Text
What is text? The answer that is often given is that a text is a sequence of sentence. This answer is clearly unsatisfactory. Text is two or more utterances that must be cohesion or connectedness one to another.

A long tradition of text linguistics that has persisted in northern Europe made some attempts about the text analysis. First, it began with attempts to account for how sentences are linked together using linguistics resources. Than, Werlich (1976) described of how linguistic features characterize strategies used in different text type (narrative, descriptive, expository and argumentative). Likewise, the prague school and it’s followers, among whom was Michael hallyday, focused on how the construction of individual construction in terms of their theme (their starting point) and rheme (what was being said about the topic) contributed to the larger pattern of information in extended texts (see fries 1983; eiler 1986; francis 1989; firbas 1992)

For example:
Werlich was enormously influential among German EFL teachers.
The explanation from the example above is that the theme (the starting point- usually the grammatical subject) is werlich, and the rheme is what is said about him (that he was enormously influential). We can repeat different number of theme over a number of sentences, and use the rheme of the one sentence in the theme of the next sentence are among the preoccupations of the prague school linguist, and they represent a major strand of functional (as defined in halliday 1997: 16) approaches to text.

    There are approaches in analyses text. First is concerning the cognitive processing of extended writing texts, and second is rethorical structure analysis.

1.    Concerning the cognitive processing of extended writing texts.
       The steps of this approaches are:
o    we need to activate a necessary scheme (or mental presentation)
o    we have to infer (if we do not know it). Since this is not stated explicitly.
o    we need to give the implicit meaning.

Communication by Written language

Written language is used in formal form and informal form. In formal form of written language,  you must follow the characteristic of writing, like when you  write a paper or letters. When you write in informal forms like on chatting and sending sort message, there is no penalty for spelling and punctuation errors. 

To write speech communication, please try not to use words you are not comfortable pronouncing or do not know the meaning of because it can lead to a less fluently delivered speech. Written texts are typically not perceived and interpreted at the same times and places. The written texts can be used in different ways, re-employed, duplicated, distributed to particular persons or groups in new situations, and these activities can be regarded as proper communicative acts. A written text and its components parts (letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs) have the character of objects; they are persistent but not temporally organized.

 Characteristics of Written Language
a.    Vocabulary
In both of languages always need vocabulary, but in writing neede letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs.
b.    Grammar
Grammar is always being needed in any kinds of language even in writing or speech even less in written language.
c.    Punctuation
There must be punctuations in written language that the use is the same with intonation in spoken language.

Code-switching and code-mixing

    Code-switching is the process of changing language from one language to another, like from Indonesian language to English. There are three types of code-switching:
·    Extra-sentential code switching, or the insertion of a tag, e.g. ‘you know’, ‘I mean’, from one language into an utterance which is entirely in another language.
·    Intersentential code switching, or switch at clause/sentence boundary, one clause being in one language, the other clause in the other, e.g. ‘Saya tahu anda benar, but you cannot blame other people’.
·    Intrasentential code switching, where switches of different types occur within the clause boundary, including within the word boundary, e.g. ‘I ingin pergi ke school with my friend jam enam, so you have to prepare everything for me’.
Beside code-switching, speaker can also do code-mixing. Code mixing is using two or more language informally between people who we know closely. In this informal situation, we can freely use our language varieties, especially when there are some words which are untranslatable in other languages. For example:
Aku ingin meng-upload foto-fotoku di Facebook
Aku sering men-download film di internet
Sampean sudah makan?
These three sentences indicate mixing between two languages. First sentence is Indonesian language, but in the middle of this sentence there are words which are taken from English (upload, internet). In the second sentence, word download is from English. The speaker takes this word to speak in Indonesian language. The last sentence is mixing between Javanese (sampean) and Indonesian language (sudah makan?).

Speech Acts By J.L. Austin

                            

In speech acts, J.L Austin has a theory about the performative acts in which a person is not just saying something but it is actually doing something if certain real world conditions are met. He pointed out that perforamtives should met felicity conditions in order to be successful. A conventional procedures,  all participants must execute the procedures, and finally the necessary thoughts, feelings, and intentions must be present in all parties. Austin devides performatives into five categories; verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives.

On the other side, Searle argued that we can speak minimally at three kinds of acts. There are utterance acts which refers to the fact that we must utter words and sentences when we want to say anything at all, prepositional acts which refers to those matters that have to do with referring and predicitng, and illocutionary acts which refers to the intents of the speakers. As the additinon, Searle also regulates some rules in governing promise-making. Those are the propositional content, preparatory rules, sincerity rules and the essential rules.

In oppose to Austin, who concentrate his study on how the speakers realize their intentions in speaking, Searle focuses on how listeners respond to the utterances. Both Austin and Searle recognize that the people use language to achieve the variety of objectives.

Language and Dialects

Many speakers do experience difficulty in deciding whether what they speak is should be called a language or a dialect of language. Haugen (1966) has pointed out that language and dialect are ambiguous term. Ordinary people quite freely to speak about various situation, but the scholars often get difficulty to deal with this problem.

In case of the Greek language, Haugen argues that language can be used to refer to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related of related norms., and dialects to refer to one of the norm; but the norm themselves are not static.

In general usage, it remains undefined whether such a dialects are part of the ‘language’ or not. In fact, the dialect is often considered as a standing outside the language. As a social norm, the dialects is a language excluded from polite norm. Language and dialects may be employed virtually interchangeably. In some cases, it depends on entirely on extra linguistic consideration, particularly in certain political or social factors.

Language and Society

Our knowledge of Language

In the way of human communication, mostly there is a code that we may call it as a language. The speakers can switch or mix the code and they have a system (grammar) in using their language. In practice, it is not easy for the linguistics to describe the knowledge about the language that people speak and put that as grammatical rules. Today, most of the linguists agree that the speaker knowledge of language is something quite abstract but a communal possession.  It explains about the rules and ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words and sentences.

Relationship between Language and Society

There is variety of possible relationship between language and society. One is that social structure may influence or determine the linguistics structure and/or behavior. The second possible relationship is directly opposed to the first; linguistic structure and/or behavior may influence or determine the the social structure. The third possible relationship is that the influence is bi-directional; language and society may influence each other. A variant of this approach is dialectical in nature. The fourth possibility is to assume that there is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure. Both of them are independent of the other.

According to Gumperz (1971), a sociolinguistics is an attempt to find correlations between social structure and linguistics structure and to observe any changes that occur. Social structure itself may be measured by reference to such factors as social class and educational background, and verbal behavior and performance may be related to these factors.

On the other side, Hymes has pointed out that a mechanical combination of standard linguistics and standard sociology is not sufficient to add a speechless sociology to a sociology free-linguistics may miss what is important in the relationship between language and society.