Separated by a Common Language

It's been months! Contrary to what's perceptible, I am still a blogger! It's just that in the aftermath of the BOOK, I've had a lot of other writing and public-engaging to do. Much of it is collected here. The most recent piece I've published was in The Guardian, and relates to some of my current research with Rachele De Felice (discussed a bit here). In the midst of all this book-promoting and writing for others, I've had to manage working my 7.5 hours/day at the day job.

So let me slip gently back into blogging, with an nice little adjective suggested to me by Paul, a correspondent who's now lived longer in the US than in his birthplace Britain. He writes:

From the Guardian, this caught my eye:

"This grade I-listed house was built in 1704 and refronted by Robert Adam in 1774-80. Inside, it has a number of ravishing interiors which are still intact. It was sold 10 years ago and since then the house has been disused."

'Disused' by H.L.I.T.

Disused? What's wrong with unused ? :) 

Fairly sure this term has been almost completely replaced by "unused" in AmE.  Obviously, the "dis" prefix has "previously used" as an implication that "unused" lacks. But still ... it really grated on my (inner) hears to read "the house has been disused" and though it worth drawing to your marvellous attention.

(Paul is showing his birthplace there with the double-L in marvellous!)

While it grates on Paul, I find the distinction between unused (connotations of 'pristine') and disused (connotations of 'abandoned') rather useful.

And I'd just not noticed it as British, but (orig. BrE) lookee here:


Very British. So, three possibilities:

1. It never made it to America (i.e. it was invented after AmE & BrE split).
2. It existed before British settlement in North America, but fell out of use into disuse in the new place. [Thanks to Tobias in the comments for the improved phrasing.]
3. It existed before British settlement, but maybe it wasn't part of the vocabulary of the people who settled in the US.

We can rule out option 1 right away. The OED has the current sense of disused back in the 1600s, so it existed for the British to bring it to America. And we can probably rule out number 3, since it seems to have been well used in 19th century AmE:

In the mid-20th century, Americans hardly knew the word at all. (It was an autological word in AmE. Disused was disused!)

But look at it getting bluer in the 2000s. Could it be in the process of a second westward migration?

I've been teaching a new course in Pragmatics this year, and this past week we ended it with a discussion of this article:

Jefferson, Gail (2002) Is ‘‘no’’ an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-83.

The author was an important name in conversational analysis and an American who lived for years in the Netherlands. In Dutch, it's common to use nee 'no' as an acknowledg(e)ment token, that is, something that you say to indicate that you've heard what your conversational partner has said. A negative token, like nee, would be used to acknowledge a negative statement.

Knowing about the Dutch nee, Jefferson decided to check how no is used as a minimal response in English, but when she started looking at a set of British conversational data, what she found didn't sit well with her own intuitions about how no is used as a conversational support. To find out why, she compared four sets of data: British doctors and patients, British 'civilians' (her term), American doctors and patients, and American 'civilians'.

Jefferson found that British civilians responded to negative statements with negative tokens 86% of the time, whereas American civilians did so only 27% of the time. British doctors did it 37% of the time, and American doctors not at all. American civilians most usually responded to negative statements with positive tokens like uh-huh, yeah (both originally AmE) and mm-hmm. So, American civilians use negative tokens at similar rates to British doctors (the 10 percentage-point difference is not statistically significant), and both of these groups use it far less than in everyday British conversation.

Jefferson next looked at whether British and American speakers use these nos for different things. She found that AmE speakers use no as an affiliative token, but not as just an acknowledg(e)ment token. That is to say, if an American says no in a conversationally supportive way (as opposed to using no more literally to disagree with the previous utterance) in response to someone's negative statement, they mean to show some empathy for the situation the speaker is describing. An affiliative token tells your conversational partner that you have not only heard them, but that you understand where they're coming from (orig. AmE). For instance, if I say I hurt my back and you say Awww, you'd be showing me that you've not only heard me, but that you feel my pain, as it were. Compare that to a simple acknowledg(e)ment token like mm-hmm, which would seem rather cold to say in such a circumstance.

BrE civilians used no as an acknowledg(e)ment token, where AmE civilians would have to use a positive form. To give a flavo(u)r of how this might lead to cross-cultural misinterpretation, here's a made-up example:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist: No...

If this were affliation, one would interpret my no as 'I know what you mean--that Matt is pretty bad about keeping in touch'. That would be the way an AmE speaker would probably use it.

But if it were just acknowledg(e)ment, then all I'd be saying is 'I heard you say that you haven't heard from Matt'. If I meant that, though, as an American, I'd have to say it a different way:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist [without lifting her eyes from New Scientist]: Uh-huh.

British me would be able to say no there without tearing myself from my magazine--but American me could not.

In their professional roles, BrE doctors seem to be careful to use no only for affliliation--that is, they don't use it for mere acknowledg(e)ment. It's possible that they do not use the negative form for acknowledg(e)ment because they need to be careful not to sound like they're affiliating when they're not. In Jefferson's data, American doctors don't even use it to affiliate--though there were some differences in the types of doctors in her two corpora, so I'm going to stop short of making any hypotheses about that.

So, I asked my students, what do you think happens when these cultures meet? The British shouldn't have much of a problem in understanding the Americans' affiliative use of no, since they use it affiliatively too. But the Americans aren't used to hearing it used as acknowledg(e)ment, and so should interpret it as affiliation. If that's the case, what will they conclude about the British? One of the students came up with the same perception that I have about what happens. (I'm eager to hear yours in the comments.) It's possible that the American would feel they'd been cut off. Once someone affiliates with you, they're essentially saying 'You don't need to explain this to me because I get it (orig. AmE)'. This whole business reminded me of my troubles with the BrE use of never mind.

To tell the truth, I'd never noticed [on a conscious level] the extra nos, in conversation with BrE speakers. But I recogni{s/z}ed the accuracy of Jefferson's observations as I started to think about it consciously--and I even thought that if I were to have imitated certain English acquaintances then I'd probably have been liberal with the interactional nos. I wonder if anyone out there has had any SbaCL moments courtesy of no. Do let us know!