Unconnected, yes. I wonder: what
do we mean when we talk about *connected* speech? We must mean
that there is at least one other kind of speech, which is not
connected, so that it makes good sense to talk about its
connectedness at all. But I would very much like to know who uses it,
unless we’re perhaps talking about the so-called one-word stage in
child language development, when spoken
utterances appear to consist of single words, or expecting speech to
and from interlocutors who look like this:
“Klaatu...
barada... nikto...”
Image © The Day the
Earth Stood Still, 1951, via Wikipedia
|
Qualifying speech with the modifier
connected also means that we somehow take “connected speech”
as a special case of speech – or it wouldn’t need qualification
by means of a dedicated adjective. This is the same kind of reasoning
which identifies some people through the qualifier multilingual,
thereby leaving it understood that there’s no need to identify in
any special way whoever is not multilingual, because there’s
nothing special about their lingualism. In the same way that
monolingualism came to represent default lingualism, unconnected
speech represents default speechiness. One language at a time
is desirable linguistic behaviour, and so is one word at a time
(whatever the word word might mean, incidentally, since nobody
has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of what a “word”
might be).
I wonder why. It could be that the only
way we might hope to identify the words of a language is by looking
at them (assuming, in turn, that we do know what “a language” might be, which is another big linguistic mystery). If you listen
to a language you never heard before, chances are you’ll have
serious trouble attempting to single out its words (assuming, in
turn, that all spoken languages have words, which is yet another moot
question). If you see a spoken language, you may have better luck.
Printed representations of speech, for those languages which have
them, may show spaces separating what in some of them we’ve come to
call words. Others won’t, because speech and whatever we
choose to call its components cannot be adequately represented in
print. It’s like attempting to represent a landscape in speech.
It’s like putting a girdle on things. A picture may be worth a
thousand words, but pictures of words tell you very little about the
thousand different ways they are pronounced, even for those
languages which may share printed representations
that you recognise.
Take my language students, who mostly
come to me after years of traditional vocabulary + grammar language
learning, where “vocabulary” means lists of words (for what
“grammar” means here, see my next post). They keep insisting that speech forms like wanna
and doesn’t, or j’sais pas and t’as vu, or
fàchavor and tá bem, are “bad” language.
They keep reminding me that even native speakers of their new
languages tell them that they use their language “better”,
because they learned it the “proper” all-words-in way, whereas
natives tend to become “lazy” when speaking – more on which in
a future post, too. And I might as well confess that some
students thought better of having me as a teacher, given my tendency
to attempt to wrestle pens and paper and books off their hands and
concentrate on training speaking and listening. This for students who
come to me because they, or their own language students, are unhappy
about matters of intelligibility
from and to users of their new languages.
I don’t blame them. In the textbooks
that they were taught by, and taught to abide by, wannas and
tá bens are either glossed over or treated in special
chapters, whose titles include the phrase “connected speech” and
which come after all the chapters dealing with speech forms which
apparently need no special treatment and so must be the “real”
speech forms. But how do you learn to understand and use a language
by first spending chapters and years memorising and spelling out
citation forms of visually unconnected words? To me, the disconnect
between language teaching and language use is the problem: not
that you say things like gonna
and you’d
and perhaps write them too, but that so many learners are not told
that people say and write these things because this is how people
speak
their languages.
Next time, as
promised, I’ll deal (sorry, I mean I will deal) with the
“grammar” part of the traditional vocabulary + grammar language
teaching methods.
© MCF 2012