Step 3: Training Methodology for the Cascade Classifier

Abercrombie (1967) también nos habla del modo indexical de referencia, y, como veremos más adelante, Levinson (1979, 1983) y Fillmore (1975, 1982a) especifican aún más al entrar en el terreno de la deixis social. Entramos ya en más profundidad en terrenos que conciernen a la cuestión de la referencia: el modo indexical subyace a la metonimia y la deixis hace uso de mecanismos similares pero más complejos. Son asuntos que se merecen una atención pausada y detallada, por lo cual se tratarán mejor por separado (véase el capítulo 5), de forma que en este capítulo podamos proseguir con una vista general de las principales propuestas que se han hecho para el tema que nos concierne a lo largo del siglo XX. Comentaremos entonces brevemente el punto de vista adoptado por el primer lingüista mencionado.

Abercrombie, profesor de fonética en la Universidad de Edinburgo, es probablemente el autor que más se aleja de la abstracción fonológica: permanece en el plano de la fonética y no se limita a considerar el papel de los alófonos relativo al fonema que realizan, sino que toma en cuestión la relación de las variantes con el entorno social. Su libro constituye una refrescante excepción; Abercrombie parte de su especialidad, la fonética, y no la contempla desde una perspectiva en particular,40 _{sino que adopta su propio estilo. Afirma Abercombie (1967: 5) por}

ejemplo que frecuentemente hay propiedades en el medio escogido para transmitir información que no son relevantes para la comunicación lingüística en sí, pero que cumplen otras funciones:

[...] a medium is far from completely absorbed by being a vehicle for a specific language. There is always a certain amount of play, as it were, within the limits of the patterns; all that is necessary for linguistic communication is that the contrasts on which the patterns are based should not be obscured. Usually, therefore, many things about a medium which is being used

as a vehicle for a given language are not relevant to linguistic communication. Such “extra- linguistic” properties of the medium, however, may fulfil other functions which may sometimes even be more important than linguistic communication, and which can never be completely ignored.

Los rasgos del medio (letra, habla etc.) que no resultan relevantes para la función referencial y comunicativa y que se utilizan para transmitir información de otro tipo los denomina rasgos indexicales:

[...] The medium, not being completely taken up by carrying the patterns which convey language, is thus able at the same time to accommodate a quite separate complex system of non- linguistic signs. A sign of this sort may be called an index, and the features of the medium which carry such indices may be called indexical features, as distinct from its linguistic features. Perhaps the most famous illustration of what an important part indexical features can play in human relations is provided by the well-known occasion when the Ephraimites were trying to get past the Gileadites and over the river Jordan without revealing their identity.

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over, that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said Nay: then said they unto him, Say now, Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites, forty and two thousand.

Both sides spoke Hebrew, but the Ephraimites unwittingly, and fatally, disclosed their geographical origins by an indexical feature of their speech - the distinctive consonant which they used at the beginning of the word “shibboleth”, and doubtless in many other words too. Since that time the word “shibboleth”, although it has taken on other meanings as well, has been used in many languages for any peculiarity of pronunciation which is an index to a person´s origins. (p. 6)

41 De este modo de referencia hablaremos más en el capítulo 5.

en un signo que propociona información social, en un signo indexical41_{. Abercrombie (p. 7)}

clasifica las propiedades del medio auditivo de la siguiente manera:

The indexical properties of the aural medium which arouse the greatest interest, in contrast to the visual medium, are probably those that indicate social rather than individual characteristics. However, the aural medium probably functions indexically more subtly and in a more pervasive way than any other kind of human behaviour. When we are with people whom we know, we constantly adjust ourselves to their moods by interpreting (unconsciously perhaps) variations in their manner of speaking, and we make immediate judgements on strangers, when we meet them, based far more on the way they talk than on what they talk about.

It is possible to make a rough division of the indices which are present in pronunciation into three classes, according to the kinds of things to which they refer:

(a) those that indicate membership of a group; (b) those that characterize the individual;

(c) those that reveal changing states of the speaker.

Observamos que la subclasificación de Abercrombie en el fondo se basa en un criterio de categorización semántica: clasifica según el tipo de significado evocado por el índice. Estamos hablando sin duda alguna de referencia exofórica. En cuanto a la palabra “acento,” Abercrombie indica que utilizada en su sentido popular se usa para referir a lo que en el fondo son índices regionales. Para los dialectos y sus correspondientes acentos sociales usa el término status indices, índices de estatus. Como dice Abercrombie (p. 8), cuando hablamos de “acento” hablamos de rasgos relativamente permanentes que se manifiestan en una “comunidad acentual”. Considera en este aspecto no solamente parámetros como región o dimensión social sino también profesión y sexo. Los miembros de una comunidad acentual están unidos por el sentimiento de que los índices de la clase (a) en vez separarlos, los unen:

All these indices to social characteristics, of course, are learnt from others, and are relatively permanent features of a person´s pronunciation. It is perhaps more useful to use the word “accent” to refer to all of them together, rather than to regional indices alone, and we will adopt

the word as a technical term in that sense. Accent, then, could be defined as that aspect of a person´s pronunciation which excludes, on the one hand, everything he has in common with all other speakers of the language, and on the other hand everything that comes under the two other classes of indices, (b) and (c). No two people speak alike, but many people speak with the same accent. Those who do may be said to form an “accent community”. The members of an accent community are bound together by the feeling that indices of class (a) unite rather than separate them.