Bilingual Puns in Bali

I came accross an old paper by Joel Sherzer on bilingual puns and word play in Bali. There are several languages in use in Bali, including Sanskrit, Old and Middle Javanese, Balinese (including the various levels - alus 'refined', biasa 'ordinary', kasar 'coarse' etc.), Indonesian and English. Most people speak many of these, and the interplay between them is a common feature of dialog. Here's some examples:

X (to Y, in Indonesian): Sudah siap? 'Are you ready?' (lit. 'already ready')
Y (in Indonesian): Sudah ayam 'Already a chicken.'

Here, siap, which means 'ready' in Indonesian, means 'chicken' in Balinese Alus. Also, ayam, means chicken in both Indonesian and Balinese Alus.

X calls out: Wayan mejalan cara taluh 'Wayan walks like an egg'.

Taluh is Balinese biasa for 'egg'. 'Egg' in Balinese alus is adeng. Adeng in Balinese biasa is 'slow'. That is, Wayan is walking slowly. People can also conduct entire conversations where the meaning is actually based on puns:

X: Mekunyit di alas? 'turmeric in the forest?'
Y: Ketemu '(type of) spice'

Here, X is asking Y if they have a girlfriend, since Ketemu is both a kind of spice and 'acquaintence'. This might just seem anoying, but it is by far the least complex punning interaction. Here's a section on popular ways of saying 'goodbye':

Here are some examples involving the sound similarity between Balinese siu 'one thousand' and Eng. See you. A person may say Siu surat, lit. '1000 letter', but a play on Eng. 'See you later', in which B, I surat 'letter' is a pun on Eng. later. Or a person may say Siu berjumpa, with Indonesian 'meet, see'. The use of meaning equivalences in different languages to go nowhere referentially is also the basis for such comebacks as Siu one thousand, based on the fact that siu is Balinese for 'one thousand'. Or a person may say Siu seribu, in which siu stands for Eng. 'See you' or Balinese siu 'one thousand', and seribu is Indonesian for 'one thousand'.

The most baroque and recherche in this group of mock leavetakings is Siu satak, lit. 'one thousand two hundred'. Again this takes off from the similarity of Balinese siu and Eng. See you, but added to this is the fact that '1200' can also be expressed as nem bangsit, lit. 'six two-hundred' - in which bangsit, with the m/b interchange seen above, sounds like mangsit 'to stink'. Once again the play is not on an uttered word, but on an imagined or presupposed word.

WHAT?
Aparrently, types of pig-latin are farily common including:
Inserting syllables with vowel echoing
Deleting all but the first Consonant-Vowel-Consonant sequence of each word
Reversing syllables
Reversing phonemes

WHAT WHAT WHAT?

Codeswitching as a Move to Markedness

One advantage of having two languages is having an extra tool with which to avoid ambiguity. For example, in English, ‘Thirteen’ and ‘Thirty’ are often confused, while in German ‘dreizehn’ and ‘dreissig’ are more different, while in Chinese ‘三十’ and ‘十 三’ are very different. Montanari (2008, pp. 622) gives an example of this tactic in a trilingual child (KAT) interacting with their grandmother (GRA) in Spanish and Tagalog:

%sit : KAT and GRA are engaged in book reading
*KAT : [‘ota].
%gls : pelota
%eng : ball in Spanish
*GRA : ¿botas ? zapatos ? zapatos.
%eng : boots ? shoes ? shoes.
*KAT : bola bola !
%eng : ball in Tagalog
*GRA : ah la pelota ahí detrá s, ahí está la pelota.
%eng : ah the ball right behind, there is the ball.

Because the child cannot pronounce the ‘pel’ of ‘peloa’ (ball), their attempt is confused with ‘botas’ (shoes). Instead of attempting the word again, or using pragmatics, the child uses the word in a different language. This makes it easier to pronounce and thus easier to understand. Perhaps, then, some codeswitching can be accounted for by this tactic.

One might assume that the optimal strategy, given two different languages, is to switch at every word. However, individual languages tend to display a move to markedness (Shillcock, Hick, Cairns, Chater & Levy, 1995). This principle is ‘that when consonant interactions introduce phonological ambiguity, the ambiguity introduced is always in the direction of a less frequent phoneme’ (Tamariz & Shillcock, 2001). That is, frequently occurring words should be optimised for pronunciation within a language, while words from another language will be free from this pressure. This suggests that frequent constructions (e.g. Noun Phrases) should be most salient in the same language. However, at larger phrase/constituent boundaries, where the probability of words co-occurring is less, words from other languages may be more salient. Code-switching phenomena such as Myer-Scotton’s embedded language frames may fall out of this interaction.

A modelling approach could be used to investigate this. A list of cognates and sentence templates in two languages will be required. Sentence templates will be filled with words from either language, based on maximising the phonetic distinctness of the sentence. This will be calculated using Markov Chain assumptions, with words as nodes and transition costs as the phonetic difference between the last phone of the current word and the first phone of the next word. To model this for children, extra costs could be imposed on transitions to words with complex consonant clusters.

This will produce sentences which are maximally phonetically distinct. Inferences about the choice of language could be drawn over many sentences and many sentence types, with particular attention being paid to constituent boundaries.

Modeling Bilingualism

When children are brought up speaking two languages, they often go through a stage of 'mixing' where they appear to be unable to separate their languages. For instance, a Welsh word might be inserted into an English sentence: As an example, when I first realised the implications of death, my parents told me that I cried and said "I don't want to go into the pridd" (earth, dirt).

Several theories have been put forward to explain this. Firstly, I may simply not have known the word for 'dirt', and had to rely on a word in another language. Back then, Welsh was probably my stronger language, so this would be an example of mixing into my weaker language. Alternatively, I had not yet learned to tell the difference properly between Welsh and English.

However, both my parents speak Welsh and both languages are used, probably with quite a lot of mixing. Therefore, I may have known the English word, and been aware that I was mixing, but I knew that using a bilingual code was permissible, given my interlocutors.

Indeed, Montanari (2008) finds that the child she studies mixes some words even when they know the word in the language of context. Does this suggest, then, that the child simply didn't know which words belonged to which language? I argue that this isn't necessarily the case.

Adults mix their languages for many reasons. In fact, it's often difficult to decide which language a word belongs to without a lot of context (e.g. 'zeitgeist'). Let's forget about languages for a minute and ask 'to what extent has the child acquired the communicative code of its parents'? By this, I mean how closely does the child's output mirror the parent's input?

To do this, let's look at Quay's (2008) study of a trilingual child. Japanese is the language of the environment, the father is strongest in English and also speaks Japanese and the mother strongest in Chinese and also speaks English and Japanese. Weekly recordings were made from 1;10 to 2;4 years. The utterances of both the child and the parents were coded along with the addressee. The summary of the data is very detailed - containing the proportions of mixing between any two people in Japanese/English, Japanese/Chinese, Chinese/English and Japanese/Chinese/English.

Let's model the child's mixing proportions as a function of the parent's mixing proportions. Each cell in the table below contains the correlation between the model’s predictions and the child’s actual mixing proportions. The first two models use the mother and father’s data separately. The third model is an additive model which combines the parents’ utterances and the fourth uses the difference between the parents’ mixed utterance types. The difference model was provided as a conceivable, but unlikely model. The correlations in the first column correspond to a model using the total input, whereas the last two columns correspond to a model using only utterances directed to the child (direct) and utterances directed to the other parent (indirect).

Although the mother spends more time with the child than the father, the total mixing behaviour of the child is equally predicted by the mother and the father. However, the best model is an additive model of the direct utterances to the child. That is, the child's output is closest to a model which tries to imitate the mixing behaviour of both parents.

Interestingly, the highest correlation between the mixing proportions is between the parents (0.999), which is nearly perfect. Perhaps, then, the child is simply trying to acquire the adult’s mixing strategies or 'Code'.

We can look at the data in more detail by calculating the correlations between mixing proportions for each interlocutor separately:

When addressing the mother, the child's mixing proportions reflect the mother’s total mixing proportions better than the father’s and vice versa, indicating pragmatic differentiation to each parents’ mixing. When addressing the father, the child’s mixing proportions reflect the mother’s indirect input. This could indicate that the child is mimicking the mother’s interaction with the father. The opposite isn't true, but any mimicry may be masked since the child spends so much time alone with the mother.

These two analyses conclude that the child’s mixing reflects the mixing of the parents from a very young age. Modelling allows us to gain extra insights on the potential learning mechanism for the child, but it relies on detailed data, as in Quay (2008). The model could be taken further to include considerations of location, the societal status of each language and the parent's tactics (Negative evidence, implicit allowance of mixing, teaching of translation equivalents etc.).

Now for the ambitious, unfounded part: Considering a communicative code, there may be no qualatative difference between mono- and bi-lingual language acquisition. How, then, do bilinguals select words? One possible solution is to use a sort of Bayesian probability distribution over the linguistic, social and pragmatic contexts for each word that represents the best estimation of when to use a word. If a mapping between words and pragmatic and social contexts is acquired, a discrete mapping between words and ‘languages’ becomes irrelevant. This approach works equally well for acquiring one ‘language’, or several levels of tone or dialect.

In this sense, the ‘remarkable’ ability to keep languages separate (Costa & Santesteban, 2004) seems less remarkable and less specific to bilinguals: We don’t find it remarkable that an adult refrains from using terms of endearment during a boardroom speech.

This approach would be extended to syntactic acquisition by assuming that, as the mapping between words and meanings developed, strings of words themselves became a context which was encodable in the probability distributions of words. This is essentially a constructivist approach to bilingual acquisition: Before linguistic acquisition, infants first learn an embodied perceptual ‘language’ – an iconic mapping between form and meaning – which allows them to relate structure in the world to an interaction between sensory and motor activity. The mapping between structure in the world and symbolic, linguistic representations would build itself on top of this system in the same way as syntactic (Bernardini & Schlyter) and lexical (Nicoladis & Secco) acquisition can build on pre-existing structures.

Following from this, the ‘difficult’ bit of language acquisition is not the segmentation of strings into words or words into lexicons, but the initial segmentation of the world into functional concepts. The development of this more fundamental understanding of the world may be an additional factor in the qualitative differences between mixing in children and adults.