Open brief aan Miles & More en Brussels Airlines

Geachte Miles&More en SN Brussels Airlines,

ik ben een frequent flyer. Elke maandag vlieg ik van Berlijn naar Brussel, en op woensdag keer ik terug naar huis. Vakantiedagen en uitzonderingen in acht genomen kom ik bijna aan 100 vluchten per jaar.

Loyaal kies ik steeds voor SN Brussels Airlines. Zij garanderen meestal stipte vluchten en een comfortabele reis tussen andere pendelaars. Omdat ik mijn vluchten zelf betaal, kies ik voor het b.light tarief waarmee ik voor ongeveer 100 euro heen en weer kan vliegen. Dat is uiterst betaalbaar en een gepaste prijs voor de dienst die er wordt aangeboden.

Het is dan ook geen wonder dat ik me bij het frequent flyer programma heb aangesloten. Eerst was ik lid van Privilege, en sinds kort van Miles & More. Die overstap heeft te maken met de fusie van SN en Lufthansa, en de opname van SN in de Start Alliance groep. Daardoor is ook het frequent flyer programma gewijzigd.

Dat mijn status mijlen van SN plotseling award mijlen van M&M werden, dat kan ik nog begrijpen. Maar dat ik nu slechts 125 mijlen per vlucht in plaats van 250 kreeg, dat vond ik minder. Bovendien verhoogde M&M ook het aantal benodigde miles om een Frequent Flyer status te krijgen.

Even rekenen leerde me dat ik met mijn tempo van heen en weer vliegen nooit een status te pakken zou kunnen krijgen. Met de schamele 125 miles per vlucht duurt het bovendien een eeuwigheid vooraleer ik me een “gratis” vlucht kan veroorloven. Met andere woorden, mijn loyaliteit wordt eigenlijk nooit beloond.

De oorzaak hiervoor is te vinden in de misleidende naam voor “frequent flyer”. Het gaat immers niet om de frequentie waarmee je vliegt, maar om de hoeveelheid geld die je binnen brengt. Het is dus geen “frequent flyer”, maar een “much money” programma.

In mijn woordenboek wordt loyaliteit gemeten aan de hand van de frequentie waarmee je van een bepaalde dienstenaanbieder gebruikt maakt. In jullie boek wordt loyaliteit echter gemeten in centen. Dat is niet eerlijk.

Voor het huwelijksfeest van m’n zus heb ik met vrienden enkele nummertjes muziek gespeeld. “Echte” muziek is toch altijd net een tikkeltje fijner dan een DJ die plaatjes draait. Onze bezetting was heel kleinschalig, met enkel een piano, ritmegitaar en drie zangeressen. Ondanks die beperkte groep zijn we er toch in geslaagd om mooie muziek te maken.

Voor een publiek van ongeveer 100 mensen heb je toch al een klein beetje versterking nodig. Ik ben geen volledige kluns met geluidsmateriaal en wist dat een kleine zanginstallatie voldoende moest zijn. Na contact gezocht te hebben met enkele PA-verhuurbedrijfjes in en rond Leuven – die doorgaans gewoon niet reageerden of een niet werkend email adres hebben; je moet weten, ik woon in Berlijn en dan is een mailtje iets goedkoper dan een telefoontje – kwam ik uit bij Sonora Leuven (http://www.sonora.name). Niet zo heel vindbaar via Google, maar uiteindelijk bleken zij precies te zijn wat ik wou.

Vlotte email-omgang, goeie kennis van zaken met aanbevelingen en suggesties (die ik helemaal niet aanvoelde als “neem dit ook nog, dan verdien ik er geld aan”, maar eerder als “ik spreek uit ervaring”) die later zeker hun waarde hebben bewezen, en zeer stipte en juiste afhandeling van de zaken. Zei ik al dat ze een handige stoep en garagepoort hebben waarlangs het afhalen van materiaal echt easy-peasy is?

Enfin, ik ben dus heel tevreden.

I am taking pictures of my fellow PhD students – and one day of my supervisors. The goal is to make it look like semi-relaxed, “I am working and I do not know you’re there” pictures, but still with a professional air over it. And that is way more difficult then I ever thought.

Usually, my pictures from birthday parties and so on are completely spontaneous, and everybody is in a sense not really worried about the pictures. This time it is different. Everybody knows that these pictures will end up on the website, and moreover, it is not spontaneous at all!

So, I am confronted with the need to “motivate” people for the pictures, make them feel at ease, and push the lever on the exact right time. Very difficult!

After reading an interview with Michael O’Leary, the so called brain behind Ryan Air, I am convinced that people should never ever fly again with Ryan Air. This man is an absolute parasite who started a company only and only to make profit and money, without the slightest love for his product and his clients. Every passenger on his air planes is merely a bag of money that “wants to go from point A to point B”.

Although there is some truth in this statement – and for many tourists, youngsters and one-time flyers it is the full truth – I do not accept it as such. Yes, I’d like to transport myself from A to B, but I am not prepared to de-humanize me for the length of the trip. And that is exactly what Michael O’Leary wants: from the time that you arrive in your departure airport until the front door of your – not so close as you’d expect it to be to your actual destination – arrival airport, you are a bag of money, tossed around without respect.

Perhaps one-time flyers are prepared to sell their soul for a slightly cheaper fare, but frequent flyers will never accept Ryan Air as their means of transportation. As a 50 flights per year person (which is still not so much, actually!) I really enjoy the faithfulness to my carrier Brussels Airlines, the usually fair prices, the interesting departure and arrival times and the fact that I do not have the impression that they see me as a bag of money. In sum, Ryan Air might be interesting for the tourists, but a large segment of the market will stay clear of Ryan Air.

My actual point that I’d like to make is however not on the quality differences between Ryan Air and other, decent carriers. Instead, I’d like to accuse Michael O’Leary of not having the slightest ethical sense. A more or less quote from the interview: “I do not invest in long-distance flights yet, because that market is still good. Only when it starts going bad in that market, I’ll start something.” I shiver when I read this, how can you be so crude?

Perhaps, more importantly, why do people choose for money, instead of quality? Quality is what makes your day, not money in your pocket.

I just discovered this cool blogpost on OpenCog. It is a very interesting blog by someone who has both time and talent for nice experiments (and he seems to have the needed hardware as well…). Although he is not directly in my line of research, which is quantitative sociolinguistics, he touches with my fondness for computational linguistis, statistics and lexical semantics via NLP.

Yesterday evening was a sparkling evening in Die Wühlmäuse am Theo, Berlin. E. and I bought tickets for König ödipus, by Bodo Wartke (http://www.bodowartke.de) several months ago. I was anxious to see one of the first German artists of which I became a fan (after the Wise Guys) live on stage.

After a first attempt, where Bodo Wartke would be part of an Adventsspiel, but he fell out due to illness, this was our second attempt to see him live. A couple of weeks ago, I received word that he broke his foot and that he would not be playing his new show in the 25th. My world almost collapsed: how could he be out on the two occasions that I wanted to see him???

Luckily he announced an Ersatzshow on the 25th in which he remained behind his piano. Poor guy. Nevertheless he was full of energy and put on a great show! We were sucked into a great rush of laughter, seriousness and plain out entertainment.

In one of his songs, he mimicks a Dutch person that says “I love you” (ik hou van jou). He makes fun of the way they say “hou” and then concludes by asking if there are Dutch people in the room he might have offended. He was completely caught off guard when E. and I raised our hands, pointing out that we were speakers of Dutch ). This was a hilarious moment for us, he was totally not expecting this!

Anyway, he is great, gave 3 extra songs and was extremely nice and friendly on stage. We booked tickets for a show in november (where he must play König ödipus, and if he is ill, I will be very angry, yes Bodo, I will be very angry!!!). I am already looking forward to it!

This essay is merely a wandering in my mind and contains thinking experiments that I would like to debate with my collegues.

Studying actual language use shows immediately that there is a huge amount of variation to be accounted for. Differences between two distinct languages (inter-lingual variation) are easy to spot. You could try to compare Dutch and German, and make an intuitive list of similarities and differences. Sometimes even, variation within one language (intra-lingual variation) is clear as well. Intuitively, laymen can write down what the difference is between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch, or German German and Austrian German, or British English and Irish English, etc.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics looks for a connection between social parameters and intra-lingual variation. A very simple research question could be about the difference between male and female speakers of Irish English. Traditionally, sociolinguists look for differences along the following sociological lines: region, socio-economic situation (social class), ethnicity, sex (gender), age, education, religion, power differences between two speakers, social distance between speakers, etc. They hope to find a correlation with a certain linguistic feature. These linguistic features can be of all kinds: syntax (e.g. word order), morfology (e.g. adjective declination), phonology (e.g. h-deletion), pragmatics (e.g. requests), etc.

There are two ways of looking at the situation: either you start from a certain sociological profile, and you look how a linguistic feature behaves, or you start from a varying linguistic feature, and see if there is a sociological profile that correlates with the internal linguistic variation. A lot of interesting research has been performed, with big names such as Labov, Chambers, Eckert, etc. Traditionally, the sociolinguists – sometimes called variationalists – are opposed to Generative linguists. The latter do research on an abstract concept “competence” that might be the perfect language. They are not interested in variation, but want to describe the language as “it is in all our heads”. The variationalists on the other hand are more interested in language as “it comes out of our mouth”, thus incorporating “errors” and “mistakes”. Moreover, this variation is not random but claimed to be sociologically motivated.

Looking at the large body of work that sociolinguists already produced, you cannot but notice that the research only looks at one feature at the time, or sometimes combining just a couple of features. As an example, the difference between male, working class people from village A are compared to male, working class people from village B is measured by their use of the work “like”. It would be of course very ambitious (but oh so complete and beautiful) if research could compare all possible sociological fingerprints, based on all possible linguistic features. This task is in itself not feasible because of limits to data collection, time constraints, sampling, ethics etc.

Not everything, but…

Starting from this ideal situation, one could say that each possible sociological fingerprint matches with (probably) a unique “vector” of linguistic features. The granularity of these sociological fingerprints will be so high that probably one or two actual language users fit the fingerprint. One could conclude that we could skip the step of detailed sociological description, and just observe individual people.

Based on their linguistic features vector, one could use similarity measures as used in neo-structuralist distributional lexical semantics which language users “speak” alike. Only at that time, sociology pops in looking for sociological structure withing the group of “speak alike” language users.

However, a big flaw in the reasoning appears here. The leap from a sociological fingerprint to an actual language user is problematic as language users tend to “change” their language depending on situational micro-sociological parameters, such as power, social distance, etc. Moreover, one cannot expect the same behavioural tendencies for all language users alike; I might speak more regional, when I meet somebody from my own region, but somebody else might actually try to speak more “standard” when he or she meets someone from my region.

This thus calls for a three dimensional matrix representation. The cells will contain the values that are approriate; we assume that we have the sociological fingerprint of the speakers (that will be “described” by using linguistic features) in a separate database. The left-to-right rowcells contain the values for the linguistic features; the top-to-bottom columncells contain the different speakers that we observe in the corpus; the front-to-bottom cells represent the conversational partner. In other words, for every other conversational partner, we make a vector of linguistic features of the speaker.

The Sky is the Limit: caveat

A representation in a three dimensional matrix might seem the end of what we can conceptualize, but it is not the limit. Consider a four dimensional matrix, with the three dimension already mentioned, plus a dimension of age. Suddenly, the study is no longer “in apparant time” and synchronous, but opens up to a diachronic survey.

This of course seems all wonderful, but there is an important caveat and it is called time. To collect this amount of data, years would be needed, yet alone the transcription of possible recorded samples will take decades. At that moment, we only have data, and no coding for linguistic features and sociological footprint whatsoever.

There would be two ways of dealing with this issue. On the one hand, the coding could be done automatically. Computational linguists might be able to help with the implementation of programs that can fill in coding schemes automatically. On the other hand, the principle of “many hands make the work light” can be applied. If there was some sort of generally accepted coding schema, a standard way of POS tagging, syntactic parsing and transcription of audio material, it would be possible to combine all the research that is done in the field into a large large dataset that can be studied.

Will this remain a dream?

Source: Schneider, K. and Barron A., 2008. Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In Variational Pragmatics. Schneider K. and Barron A. (eds.) pages: 1-31. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The domain of Variational Pragmatics is a combination of pragmatics and variational linguistics. It studies pragmatic variation in geographical and social space, but also functions on the interface of pragmatics and variational linguistics as it focuses on both regional and social variation. Variational pragmatics hope to combine and to complete dialectology and pragmatics.

On the one hand, dialectology is claimed to miss out on certain pragmatic elements.  A long time, dialectology focused on accentology (variation in pronunciation). Lexical and some grammatical aspects entered the domain as well, but research questions about i.e. variation on the level of polite language do not occur. However, “the choice of how to say something may depend upon who is talking to whom under what social circumstances” (Wolfram & Schilling, 2006).

On the other hand, pragmatics have been looking for universal features, assuming that language communities are homogeneous wholes. Wierzbicka wrote a seminal paper on this, titled “different cultures, different languages, different speech acts”. The title gives it away; this paper goes against the common assumption that what is valid for English, counts for other languages as well. In a rather intuitive way, she shows that pragmatics should look into the naturally occuring variation in language use (as dialectology does). In that sense, the approaches of intralingual pragmatic variation are the forerunners of variational pragmatics.

Before stepping up to a detailed survey of the research possibilities, a note on terminology. The term “dialect”, common in dialectology, refers to regional variation. However, because of the shift to other types of variation, the term “dialect” is generalized to denote all types of language use, be it different due to region, sociological issues, etc. The ambiguity between “dialect” as ‘regional variation’ and “dialect” as the hypernym ‘all types of varying language use’ is problematic.  Therefore, the term “variety” is introduced to denote the hypernym; the term “dialect” is replace by “regiolect”, as “dialect” has grown a negative connotation. In short, the term “variety” is an umbrella-term for whatever variation one may encounter in language use.

Combining the knowledge of both pragmatics and dialectology, the dimensions along which language can vary are now more or less defineable. On the one hand, there is more or less stable variation that “defines” a language user in a constant way.

• regional variation (national, subnational, pluricentric)
• socio-economical variation
• ethnic variation (native, non-native, integration)
• gender (male, female, homosexual)
• age (young, old)
• education
• religion
• etc.

On the other hand, situational variation may occur along the following (micro-social) dimensions:

• social distance (symmetric, asymmetric conversations)
• power
• assimilation
• etc.

From pragmatics, it is possible to find out which tangible features can be looked at to measure these dimensions. There are five levels of features:

• formal level: T/V pronouns, response tokens, discourse markers, hedges
• action level: requests, thanking, apologies, invitations
• interactional level: small talk, adjacency pairs
• topic level: taboo, discourse structuring device cf. conversational topics
• organisational level: turn taking, pauses, overlaps

These (levels of) features can be used to distinguish the dimensions mentioned above. As an example, the combination of a certain scientific topic, long pauses and many requests may “define” the dimensions of an asymmetrical conversation between an older professor and a younger student (age, social distance, power). This observation is one of the main points in my PhD research.

Yesterday, I was able to experience something wonderful in the Radialsystem V here in Berlin. Their Nachtmusik programme consists of late evening concerts in a studio/loft on the fifth floor in the Radialsystem. It’s a low ceiling space, industrial concrete, large windows, but with very good acoustics! The audience lays down in a circle around a central spot in which the artists can stand. Yoga mats and pillows are there for your comfort. The whole atmosphere is just great.

So, yesterday evening we listened to a Dutch quartet of male singers – Egidius – who sang songs from the 14th century until now. It was amazing how well and clear the alto was performed and I like the bass also. The tenor seemed a little insecure and the baritone was sweating but steady. It was very interesting to hear that the music in itself did not change so much, although you could clearly distinguish the modern music from the older pieces (clusters and so on…).

They sang beautiful (and difficult) songs from Orlando di Lasso and Schubert with a lot of respect, and texts such as the Egidius poem were performed breath-takingly. For me, this was a very successful performance.