My first foray into Classical study

Last Friday 20^th May, for the first time in nearly a year, I presented an academic paper. For the first time ever, it was to a group of postgrads and (half of it) was about Classics… suffice to say I was somewhat nervous about it. Though not as nervous as my colleague Becca, when a well-meaning lecturer asked her what she would be speaking about that evening (not the first time we’ve been mixed up, but such is life with a common first name).

Photo from http://www.centraleasteurope.com/croatia/zadar.htm

Anyway. The context was a Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar, a weekly event in the faculty which sees two people present their research and ideas, usually from two different disciplines within Classics. That evening I was not the first to speak; that honour went to Iva Rukavina from Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, who was speaking about Late Antique, Early Christian architecture in Zadar, in her home country of Croatia. Her analysis of a little-studied region was very interesting, and clearly presented; this was evident in the fact that I gained a lot of knowledge from it despite having no background in archaeology or the history of Dalmatia whatsoever! However there were some very knowledgeable people in the audience, among them Professor Robin Cormack, who interacted well with our trilingual visitor.

  

On the latter point, I felt slightly inferior about the fact that I barely have three languages to present in, and certainly was not presenting in my third language like Iva was!

But I proceeded to talk about current issues in psycholinguistics, such as the interaction between bilingualism and other cognitive processes, both linguistic and non-linguistic, and how these discussions might be used to look at classical bilingualism from a different angle. The study of classical linguistics is a healthy, if small, field, and is continuing to grow (despite being, as one PhD student put it, about 20 years behind mainstream linguistics). There is a strong tradition of historical and comparative linguistics, thanks to the starring roles of Latin and Greek in the Indo-European family tree, but the study of bilingualism has come to the fore only relatively recently, thanks to the “bible” of J.N. Adams (Bilingualism and the Latin language, 2003) and other studies by his contemporaries, such as Simon Swain and Mark Janse.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_cicero.html

In order to link present day study to classical language use, I used Cicero’s letters as an example; obviously the normal problems of having to rely on written texts were an issue, as was a certain reliance on anecdotal evidence and the fact that I was essentially pinching other people’s examples (well-referenced ones, I promise!) Quite a lot of study has already been done on code-switching in his letters, particularly from a sociolinguistic point of view, but I wanted to try out disassociating sociolinguistic intentions from psycholinguistic processes, to see what ideas came up.

  

Here’s one as an example. Swain (2002, p.156) said something which really made me think: “Though Cicero could write literary Greek, this does not mean he thought or spoke Greek regularly”. Firstly it is interesting to point out that whilst Cicero wrote Greek in a literary style, the Greek he used was very much the Greek of his time, Hellenistic Greek with a convincing accent and a wide vocabulary comprising many words, literary and technical, for which his is the first recorded use. Secondly, it is an oft-quoted maxim that when writing in a foreign language, one must think in it in order to produce as natural and as native-like a piece of work as possible. In fact it’s not just popular wisdom; Kobayashi and Rinnert’s 1994 study of English/Japanese bilinguals showed that low-proficiency groups produced better texts (ie. well-constructed with coherent ideas) through translation, high-proficiency groups performed better when composing directly in the L2 (here English) because the texts were less “awkward” and the language was more cohesive. Could this apply to Cicero? I think it is possible, though it was also pointed out that the four skills of language use (reading, writing, listening and speaking) call upon quite different cognitive processes, so the mastery of one does not de facto assume high competence in the others.

That’s a vague overview of the kind of thing I was thinking about, and I was lucky enough to have a very attentive and interesting group of people to interact with once I’d finished; almost everyone had something to contribute, though I think that that is as much due to the way in which linguistics is relevant to all of us as language users (most people there were bi- if not multilingual) as it was due to my talk. I think we all agreed that psycholinguistic theories wouldn't represent a grand new field in the study of classical linguistics, but that they could add an interesting second and complementary dimension to other, more established, ways of looking at language use.

So I’d like to say thank you to everyone who came for creating such a supportive and stimulating environment – I really enjoyed talking about something I’m passionate about in the context of something that they as Classicists are passionate about, and the practice in terms of preparing, presenting and fielding questions was invaluable.

And in the news today:
--President Obama’s first state visit to the UK ends, having been extended by a day due to the latest volcanic eruption in Iceland.
--LSE is the first major UK university to announce fees of less than £9,000 for the academic year 2011-12 (they’ll be charging £8,500, quelle différence…)
--England’s Test match season kicks off against Sri Lanka, hampered by a heavily rain-affected day in Cardiff.