The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford

Renée Blake, Isabelle Buchstaller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429765322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This comprehensive collection is the first full book-length volume to bring together writing focused around and inspired by the work of John Rickford and his role in sociolinguistic research over the last four decades. Featuring contributions from more than 40 leading scholars in the field, the volume integrates both historical and current perspectives on key topics in Rickford's body of work at the intersection of language and society, highlighting the influence of his work from diverse fields such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, creole studies, and language and education.

The volume is organized around four sections, each representing one of the fundamental strands in Rickford's scholarship over the course of his career, bookended by short vignettes that feature stories from the field to more broadly contextualize his intellectual legacy:

• Language contact from a sociolinguistic and sociohistorical point of view

• The political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity

• The stylistic implications of language variation and change

• The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice

Taken together, The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford serves as a platform to showcase Rickford's pioneering contributions to the field and, in turn, to socially reflective linguistic research more generally, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creole studies, language and style, and language and education.

Part I
Introduction

1
Introduction to the Volume

Renée Blake and Isabelle Buchstaller

John Russell Rickford is one of the most influential linguists in the field of language and society. During his four-decades-long career, his work has shaped and continues to influence research in areas as diverse as Creole studies, sociolinguistics, stylistics, education, and language and politics, to name a few. He is a Black scholar of Caribbean descent who has mentored and nourished many scholars, critically including Black and Brown scholars, many of whom have gone on to greatly impact their fields. And he has stalwartly maintained that linguistic research has to be grounded in—and advance—social justice and, further, that linguists have an obligation to the communities that they study.

The pervasive threads that run through John R. Rickford’s body of work—as well as through this volume—are the emphasis on combining solid linguistic analysis with rigorous methodological acumen, the importance of analyzing language with a clear social consciousness, and the awareness of the sociopolitical ramifications of the work linguists do. While it is impossible to do full justice to the breadth and depth of John’s contributions to the field, this collection attempts to do his varied interests justice by inviting chapters centering around four main strands of research which are representative of John R. Rickford’s scientific career:

• The investigation of language contact from a sociolinguistic and sociohistorical point of view
• The study of the political ramifications of linguistic heterogeneity
• The analysis of the stylistic implications of language variation and change
• The educational implications of linguistic heterogeneity and social injustice

These four thematically coherent stands provide the structuring principles for this volume. They are framed by introductions written by experts in these four areas: John Victor Singler, Alicia Beckford Wassink, Edward Finegan, Julie Sweetland, and Angela E. Rickford. These introductory pieces link John R. Rickford’s intellectual legacy with the individual chapters featured in the respective sections, triangulating them with current and historical research in these areas of linguistics.

Throughout his academic trajectory, John R. Rickford has maintained intense working relationships with a host of researchers, including contemporaries and former students, many of whom have become key players in their respective fields of scientific inquiry. The purpose of this Festschrift is thus to unite, in one venue, colleagues, contemporaries, and former students from several academic areas, including sociolinguistics, Creole studies, linguistic anthropology, education, and language and politics. Some of these voices are represented in the 47 chapters; other voices are captured in 12 vignettes that focus on particular aspects of John R. Rickford’s life and career.

This Festschrift is the first book-length volume to bring together work centering on John R. Rickford, one of the leading scholars of our time. By giving a platform to scholars who are united by an overall impetus to investigate language structure and language use with a social consciousness, we also aim to provide a go-to volume for socially meaningful linguistic research. At the same time, we present this volume as a token of love to a consummate scholar from a community of people who owe so much to his inspiration, his scholarship, and his example.

2
The Makings of a Linguist

John R. Rickford’s Education in His Native Guyana

Ewart A.C. Thomas

It is indeed a pleasure to contribute in a small way to this dedicatory volume for the prodigious researcher and teacher, who is also my friend and colleague, John R. Rickford. The editors’ remit to me was that I provide ‘insights into the person that lies at the heart of this impressive research.’ I accepted their invitation, despite the well-known difficulties of constructing a biography in which certain events, and not others, are interpreted as pivotal and are then arranged in a more-or-less causal account (possibly allowing limited roles for ambiguity and chance) of the subject’s life story. I hoped that these narrative difficulties would be mitigated by (1) John’s already extensive reflections on the formative influences of his high school, Queen’s College (QC), in Guyana; (2) my ready appreciation of these influences, owing to the fact that I, too, attended QC seven years before John; and (3) my understanding of, and admiration for, John’s work arising from our research collaborations and from our friendship during nearly four decades of overlap on the Stanford faculty.

The High School Years, 1960–1967

Because QC features prominently in the present chapter, a brief commentary on it is warranted. The high school was established in 1844 by the British government during the colonial period and was modeled after the British public schools. (Indeed, in the English-speaking Caribbean, most of the colonies had two to five schools like this, with Trinidad, Barbados, and Jamaica having more than the others. These schools have produced a disproportionate share of the region’s politicians, professionals, artists, and intellectuals, and one such school on the small island of St. Lucia produced two Nobel Prize winners, one in economics [1979], and the other in literature [1992]!) The curriculum at QC in the 1950s and 1960s offered mathematics and the physical and biological sciences, as well as a classical, Anglo-centric component that included English literature, Latin, French, Spanish, art, woodwork, and a large dose of British history and geography. In addition, students were encouraged to participate in athletics, debating, journalism, chess, the performing arts, the Cadet Corps, and other extracurricular activities, many of which provided us with a wealth of what are now called ‘leadership training opportunities.’

Starting in the mid-1950s, the teachers hired by QC included some who had studied at the newly founded University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and they introduced into our classrooms topics that were not necessarily on the syllabi of our Ordinary Level examinations (O-Levels)—topics such as the politics of race and class, colonial history, regional integration, and the Cuban revolution. In sum, QC was then, and still is, one of the top high schools in Guyana, owing to, for example, its highly credentialed and dedicated teachers, high-achieving students, broad curriculum, and well-appointed science laboratories and sports fields. Attendance at QC, as at the other similar schools in the Caribbean, is a good predictor of ‘success.’ However, any claim that a specific aspect of QC was responsible for a specific ‘successful’ life outcome ought to be regarded as tentative, because, to state the obvious, (1) not every QC student exposed to the specific aspect enjoyed ‘success,’ (2) many non-QC students have been ‘successful,’ and (3) schools other than QC possessed some of the advantages associated with QC, such as dedicated teachers and high-achieving students, even if to a lesser extent, and this is why many of their students enjoyed ‘success.’ This caveat notwithstanding, it is to be hoped that the present attempt by an aspiring biographer to plot a narrative arc from past events at QC to current ‘success’ can still be revealing.

In interviews and essays, John has identified various aspects of his experience at QC as being crucial to his psychological and academic development. He took full advantage of the aforementioned leadership training opportunities. For example, he was president of the debating society; editor of the school newspaper, The Lictor, and of the School Magazine; and head prefect in his last year. But perhaps the most subtle of these aspects is the set of affordances that were created at QC by the earlier academic successes of John’s older siblings. John was the last of ten children, and two of his three brothers also attended QC, while his oldest sister attended St. Rose’s High School (Ursuline Convent), and another four sisters attended Bishops’ High School—all prestigious schools, none of which was co-ed at the time. (It is fair to surmise that having eight children from one family attend these privileged high schools would be an entry in the Guinness World Records, if said institution could be persuaded to invent the appropriate category!) Attending QC must, therefore, have been one of John’s early goals and, in 1960, he did win one of the coveted Guyana government scholarships that allowed him to enroll there. Further, some of John’s teachers at QC knew his siblings, either at high school or at university, and, therefore, had high expectations of him. For example, John tells the story of scoring about 10% on the first test in one of his French classes, only to be confronted after class by his teacher, Roger Isaacs, who told him that he knew John’s sister at university and, because she was smart, John “cannot be as dunce as” his test score suggested! The teacher insisted that John come to his after-school lessons, and the result was that, by the end of the term, John’s score had risen to 72%, placing him second in the class, and French became one of the three subjects (the others being English literature and history) that he took at the Advanced Level examinations (A-Levels) three years later.

Of particular relevance to the present essay are the links John traces from interactions with three of his QC teachers to his interest in English literature and his later specialization in linguistics. One of these teachers, Ivy Loncke, impressed upon him, in his last English literature class, the value of revising and rethinking as one tries to produce work of the highest quality. Another, C.A. Yansen,

was also a fount of jokes and ‘ole time’ stories, many of them depending on dramatic contrasts between standard English and deep Creolese.… [He] went on to write a column entitled Random Remarks on Creolese for the [Guyana] Independence Issue of the QC Lictor in 1966, and subsequently published it as a book. I was editor of the Lictor at the time, and I was positively influenced by that piece, as I was by learning of the serious MA and PhD theses that my late headmaster, Richard Allsopp, had done on Guyanese Creole English—which may account in part for my decision to switch from Literature to Linguistics in college and to focus on Guyanese Creole for my PhD dissertation and other works.

(Essay written for the Magazine of the Florida QC Old Students Association,
August 16, 2009; personal communication)

John got a rare ‘Distinction’ in English literature at A-Level, and a year later he was awarded a Fulbright Grant for undergraduate study at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

The Undergraduate Years, 1968–1971

Other teachers taught John the importance of hard work (he is an excellent model for his students in this regard!), and of encouraging students to do better, especially those students whom others regard as ‘not bright.’ Even the tradition of entertaining their students outside the classroom, which John and his wife, Angela E. Rickford, a professor of Special Education at San Jose State University, maintain, is modeled partly after the practices of some of John’s teachers at QC and UCSC. For example, J. Herman Blake, a professor at UCSC, took John and other students to the Sea Islands in South Carolina to examine relatively pristine African American communities and to work on community service programs. John has said that his own research projects with Stanford undergraduates in East Palo Alto, California, and the ‘learning expeditions’ he organized for students, faculty, and staff when he was director of Stanford’s African and African American Studies Program were but an updating of the ‘scholar as community servant’ model exemplified by Professor Blake and others at UCSC. Interestingly, the very first of his Stanford ‘learning expeditions’ went to the Sea Islands, just as John had gone 30 years earlier.

While John’s development from scholar to scholar-servant may have been most pronounced at UCSC, owing to his participation in, for instance, community service projects and student protests over the Vietnam war and racial injustice, it can be seen also in the earlier QC years. For example, a history teacher at QC, Robert Moore, encouraged his students to do original research on the different ethnic groups and institutions in Guyana, and John notes that ‘it left me with a lifelong respect for the ability of even a high school student or first year undergraduate to engage in original research.’ At the same time, John’s journalistic and debating exercises must have been influenced by the local and regional discourse of the 1960s on issues such as the political tensions between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese, the timing of political independence, and the design of postcolonial education. In similar vein, much of John’s work during the years since UCSC shows him applying his skills as a linguist to improve the life of the very people whose speech is the focus of his work. I will illustrate this commitment through a small sample of his work.

The Linguist as Community-Servant

After graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, John returned to Guyana to teach at the University of Guyana. In 1975, his second year of teaching there, he had the students in his ‘descriptive linguistics’ class explore, as part of their coursework, Guyanese vocabulary in different areas, such as, proverbs, hire-car names, and ethnic influences. The quality and quantity of the students’ data were so high that John decided to share the work with the larger Guyanese public at an event advertised as a festival of words, rather than, for example, a conference on syntax and phonology. And to further increase expected attendance, free food and drink were promised! The festival was a success, attracting rice farmers, teachers, students, housewives, and other laypersons, some of whom generated insightful discussions from which everyone benefited. The second edition of the festival proceedings was expanded to include a section on Guyanese language in use from the late nineteenth century to the time of the festival. This section included examples of Creolese (some samples deeper than others) used in the law courts, newspaper cartoons, proverbs, poetry, and folksongs. Also included was an important text by J. Graham Cruickshank that gives examples of the speech of formerly enslaved Africans, and the author’s ideas ‘of how language learning in the New World took place.’ Because of this breadth, the edited volume, A Festival of Guyanese Words (Rickford 1978), contains much material that is of interest to linguistic researchers, and to the wider audience. Indeed, it is to be hoped that researchers, especially those interested in Guyanese Creole, will mine this rich material in future studies.

Two decades after Festival, John, by then a professor at Stanford University, was drawn into the controversy over the recognition and adoption of African American Vernacular English (AAVE, also known as Ebonics) in American schools. His first response was to marshal the research findings that demonstrate the value of taking the vernacular variety of a language into account when teaching students to read and write, and to make successful transitions to the standard variety, in this case, Standard American English (SAE). Then he and his wife, Angela, worked with students, teachers, schools, and school districts to translate this scholarship into classroom practices that would improve students’ English language functioning. (For a summary of this work, see https://web.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/.)

This pattern of recognizing an important societal problem, collecting relevant research findings, and then working to help those affected adversely can be seen also in John and Angela’s work on behalf of Rachel Jeantel, the key witness in the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Much of this work is presented in an award-winning paper in Language by John and his student, Sharese King (2016e, p. 949), in which the authors conclude that ‘[w]orking for justice can take many forms, but for linguists, we believe it should include listening to vernacular dialects more closely and hearing their speakers more clearly and more fairly, not only in courtrooms, but also in schools, job interviews, apartment searches, doctors’ visits, and everywhere that speech and language matter.’

My last example of John’s attentiveness to the welfare of his speakers is a recent interdisciplinary project conducted by a team of economists, linguists, psychologists, and public policy researchers that included John and myself (Rickford et al. 2015d). We examined the effects on AAVE use (relative to SAE use) of the poverty level of the neighborhood in which a speaker lives. One motivation for studying these neighborhood effects on AAVE use is the need to address the well-known dilemma that, while AAVE use is valuable to the speaker, at least as an expressive resource and a marker of identity, it is associated with adverse educational and economic outcomes. In this project, sociolinguistic measures of speech were obtained from a follow-up study of non-Hispanic African American youth, who were included in a large-scale experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO). MTO used a randomized experimental design to assign a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing to either an ‘experimental group’ that received a voucher allowing the family to move to a lower-poverty neighborhood, or a ‘control group’ that received no voucher. (It should be noted that not every family in the voucher—or experimental—group chose to move to a lower-poverty neighborhood, and some families in the no-voucher [or control] group did so move.) We compared AAVE use between the two groups formed by random assignment and found that AAVE use was significantly less in the experimental than the control group. We believe that this is the first demonstration of the causal effect of neighborhood type on AAVE use.

As with most attempts to translate research findings into public policy, the policy implications of this causal effect have to be delineated with care. This is so for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• John R. Rickford Publications
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Exploring Language Contact From a Sociolinguistic and Sociohistorical Point of View
• PART III The Political Ramifications of Linguistic Heterogeneity
• PART IV The Stylistic Implications of Language Variation and Change
• PART V The Educational Implications of Linguistic Heterogeneity and Social Injustice
• PART VI Vignettes
• Index