Lecture | Discontinuous Lexica and Multilingualism: A Missing Chapter in Standard Accounts of Linguistic Competence

A lecture by Michael Shapiro (Visiting Scholar, Harriman Institute, Columbia University; Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies, Brown University).

It is a truism of linguistics that the grammars of native speakers are discontinuous, which alludes to the principle of language competence encompassing the idea that no two persons have exactly the same grammar of the language they share as native speakers. To a very large extent, precisely what is discontinuous is their vocabularies, their command of the lexical stock of the language. This whole topic constitutes a chapter missing from standard accounts of linguistic competence. Presented is some material that might go toward filling the lacuna. The focus is on the role multilingualism plays in characterizing the English-language competence of native or near-native speakers. Along with examples from belles lettres, an illustrative case study, including longitudinal biographical data, is furnished by the presenter's own nuclear family of eight (parents, five children, governess), in which several European and Asian languages flesh out a picture of habitual multilingualism.

Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is the author with his late wife, the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art and of the triptych The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic, The Sense of Change: Language as History, and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language. His 2007 book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a set of authorial annotations of his only work of fiction, the novel My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge.