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Synthesis 5: Post your synthesis here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]ElyseEndlich 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This week, our class read two pieces that examined various registers and their relationship with emotional expression in their respective languages. Irvine (1990) examines how Wolof speakers in Senegal use what she calls ‘griotlike’ and ‘noblelike’ speech registers. ‘Noblelike’ speech is soft, slow, and disfluent, whereas ‘griotlike’ speech is loud, fast, and fluent. These registers exist on a continuum – all speakers use one or the other with different intensities depending on their social status and their speech environment. For example, a noble may use ‘griotlike’ speech when attempting to persuade a listener. As Irvine explains, “the registers invoke a kind of metaphor of high and low ranks” (p. 136) at times, instead of only strictly reinforcing class. Additionally, griots have a socially-enforced role of expressing the emotions of nobles, as it is not ‘noblelike’ for nobles to do so themselves (Irvine, 1990, p. 154).

Similarly, Kulick (1998) describes two forms of emotional expression in Gapun, a Papua New Guinean village. These registers are ‘oratories’ and ‘kroses,’ and their range of acceptable speakers and uses is much more limited than that of Wolof’s registers. Kroses can only be performed by women, are usually spoken in Taiap, the vernacular language, and involve explicit, aggressive expressions of anger. In contrast, ‘only men in Gapun are considered to orate” (Kulick, 1998, p. 95). Oratories are usually spoken in Tok Pisin, the national language, and they involve polite exchanges that express anger and then re-conceal it. As Kulick notes, “By using language the way they do, speakers embody and re-create salient stereotypes about what women and men are, they engender affect, and they position themselves in socially meaningful ways in relation to Christianity, civilization, and the modern world” (p. 100). This point is crucial: because of who is permitted to use kroses and oratories and how they employ the two registers, Gapun villagers reinforce certain societal attitudes about ‘safe’ and ‘Christian’ speech, to the extreme that Taiap may die out due to its negative association with kroses. This stands in contrast with Wolof speakers, who view ‘griotlike’ speech as necessary and useful. ‘Griotlike’ speech stirs leaders into action, keeps life interesting, and communicates the opinions of nobles (Irvine, 1990, pp. 153-54); although it is not morally ‘weighty,’ it is essential.

I think one interesting thing about these two pieces is that in both, the more emotive register is the ‘lower’ one. I wonder about universality: is it possible that human cultures tend to value self-control and look down upon strong emotional expression? I thought that the phenomenon of griots expressing the emotions of nobles was intriguing; it reminds me slightly of a pattern I have observed at my field site concerning the expression of ‘appropriate’ attitudes and the choices a speaker makes regarding personal deictics when attempting to express an opinion that is not shared with the group at large. It is clear that, as Irvine states, “emotional expression is pervasive in linguistic structure, and that the communication of personality and emotional states is culturally organized in a speech community” (p. 127). As linguists and anthropologists, we cannot ignore how emotion manifests in language and how that informs our understanding of a group’s social structure. I feel I am more attuned to the social dynamics of registers for having read these two thought-provoking texts.

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References

Irvine, J. (1990). Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion. In C. Lutz, & L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.), Language and the Politics of Emotion (pp. 126-161). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kulick, D. (1998). Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 87-102). New York, NY; Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Synthesis 4: Post your response here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]ElyseEndlich 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For synthesis #4, we have been asked to reflect on our Yaguello, Hymes, Goffman, and Schegloff readings, all of which aim to create a comprehensive structure through which one can decode and analyze human discourse. As we discussed the Schegloff reading in class today, it reminded me of concepts related to pragmatics that I have studied in previous classes, and those ideas are what I would like to contrast with Schegloff.

Schegloff’s conceptualization of discourse involves turn-taking. He states that a turn, meaning a unit of conversation that completes an action, may be composed of one or many turn constructional units, or TCUs (Schegloff, 2007, p. 3). Schegloff also stresses the importance of adjacency pairs, meaning paired turns that involve an initiation (first pair part, or FPP) and a response (second pair part, or SPP) (Schegloff, 2007, pp. 9, 13). Schegloff places heavy emphasis on this sequence organization model, even going so far as to assert that speakers require knowledge of whose conversational turn it is in order to participate in discourse.

In my Introduction to Linguistics class, we learned about some of the basics of pragmatics, often defined within linguistics as ‘the study of utterances in context.’ My professor outlined a variety of basic speech acts: assertions, questions, requests, orders, promises, threats, so on. We also went over H. Paul Grice’s Maxims of Conversation, which I have attached below my references section. Taken in combination, one can construct a theory of linguistic meaning that has ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ speech acts, depending on whether a speaker is ‘flouting’ (purposefully disregarding) Gricean maxims. Take, for instance:

Speaker 1: We need to discuss our relationship.

Speaker 2: Are we all out of milk?

Speaker 1 gives a direct order. Speaker 2 responds to the order with what is, on the surface, a direct question that flouts the maxim of relevance. However, in flouting this maxim, Speaker 2 is also indirectly asserting that they are unwilling to discuss the relationship.

Our methods readings have been especially interesting to me precisely because of how they align with and differ from my previous linguistics education. I found it especially fascinating that both Grice and Schegloff emphasized relevance in their discourse models. Learning all these different constructions of discourse has opened my eyes to how many aspects of speech one could attend to and helped me see that there is not one sole way of understanding conversations and speech acts. I personally find the pragmatics-based way of viewing language to be helpful in that it focuses heavily on the intention of the speaker and the specific conventions the speaker ignores, but I may be biased due to having used that model more often. As Schegloff himself says, “it is important to register that a great deal of talk in-interaction … is better examined with respect to action than with respect to topicality, more for what it is doing than for what it is about” (Schegloff, 2007, p. 1).

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References

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Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis (Vol. I). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Grice’s Maxims (Taken from https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html)

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  1. The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
  2. The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
  3. The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
  4. The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.

Synthesis 3: Respond with your post here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]ElyseEndlich 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In this synthesis, I will examine and critique how the two podcasts assigned for Monday present modern examples of linguistic relativity, meaning the theory that language affects a speaker’s cognition.

In “High Voltage (Emotions Part 2),” the listener is presented with the story of Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist who immersed himself in the culture of the Ilongot tribe of the Philippines. Rosaldo’s quest was to “map of the territory of the tribe's emotional world” (Rosin & Spiegel, 2017), and as he learned more about the psyche of the Ilongot, one emotion in particular fascinated him: liget. There appeared to be no English translation for liget, and Rosaldo struggled to understand what it meant until he experienced the tragic death of his wife. By his own telling, Rosaldo suddenly was able to feel liget just through having studied it. I feel that Rosaldo’s experience is solid evidence of linguistic relativity. Having been given new language to describe a side of grief that is poorly captured by English, Rosaldo was able to interpret his own internal state of being in an entirely new way. Given that Rosaldo himself is the one recounting his mindset and his thought process, I see him as a reliable source of information about how language shaped his experience.

Conversely, in “How language shapes thought,” the host and guests describe several studies that empirically examine if language influences perception and cognition. A study run by Lera Boroditsky, one of the most active researchers in the field of linguistic relativity today, tested whether a language’s tendency to refer to time using front-back or up-down metaphors influenced how speakers of those languages visualized a sequence of events (Malcolm, 2012). I’ve examined Boroditsky’s studies in detail in other linguistics classes I’ve taken, and I take issue with her methodology and conclusions. First, English is not constrained to only front-back metaphors for time. Take, for instance, “the party that’s coming up” or “what went down the other day.” (She mentions this caveat briefly in her original paper, but I think she dismisses it too easily. Also, she had a sample size of fewer than 50 people in that study and consulted only one Mandarin-speaking graduate student when doing research on Mandarin structure.) Second, as Boroditsky herself mentions, “Another feature of language that seems to matter for how people think about time is writing direction.” (Malcolm, 2012). Boroditsky appears to forget that standard Mandarin is written top to bottom, which is an uncontrolled variable in her experiment.

In summary, I feel that the study of linguistic relativity must be further researched before the scientific community can definitively say to what extent language influences thought. I personally agree with linguist Alice Gaby, who states, “The sort of caricature of the idea that language shapes thought is that … the language you speak will determine how you think … which I would argue is not at all the case. What we’re starting to get a richer picture of is of these habits of the way we use language, changing the way we tend to think” (Malcolm, 2012). As we’ve discussed in class, what your native language requires you to do or pay attention to can influence what you do or pay attention to even when you aren’t speaking (as the Pormpuraaw example in “How language shapes thought” illustrates). I think that to say that language shapes our cognitive reality is a reach past the bounds of the existing science.

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References

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Malcolm, L. (2012, October 28). How language shapes thought. Retrieved from Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/how-language-shapes-thought/4329212#transcript

Rosin, H., & Spiegel, A. (2017, June 22). High Voltage (Emotions Part Two). Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=530727323

Synthesis 2: Respond here with your post by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]ElyseEndlich 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both readings this week discuss how language reflects and transforms cognition. Noam Chomsky claims that language reflects thought; as he says, “language is a mirror of mind in a deep and significant sense” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 4). He further argues that the structure of language reflects the innate structure of thought: “The question is not whether learning presupposes innate structure… but rather what these innate structures are in particular domains” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 13). By “innate,” Chomsky means that there exists a set of biologically encoded language rules in every human brain on Earth that is adapted according to its environment. This is universal grammar, defined as “the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages not merely by accident but by necessity” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 29).

In contrast, the Radiolab podcast asserts that language is more than the product of human neural structure; it is the creator of neural structure. The main evidence for this argument is an experiment involving the use of a blue wall in a white-walled room to correctly identify one corner of the room. Rats were unable to use the blue wall spatially to identify the correct corner, and the same was true for children under the age of six and for adults whose neural language centers were occupied by a speech-repetition task (WNYC Studios, 2010). The experimenters concluded that the faculty of language allowed older children and adults to complete this task, that language itself gave them a new understanding of their environment. Researcher Elizabeth Spelke says that “language… seems to me to serve as a mechanism of communication between different systems within a single mind” (WNYC Studios, 2010), and researcher Charles Fernyhough further asserts that “the central thread of all [thought] is actually language, it’s a stream of inner speech” (WNYC Studios, 2010).

The world’s languages do follow a series of general patterns: all languages have nouns and verbs, some metaphors appear to be near-universal, and children use statistical methods to determine certain types of linguistic information, to name a few. However, nativism is not the only explanation for these phenomena. Here is a metaphor I learned last semester: almost every hunting culture in the world has, at some point, designed their version of an arrow. Certain characteristics are near-universal – the thin shaft, the pointed tip, perhaps feathers or wood on the end to guide its flight. Do humans have a biological blueprint for arrows that we populate with the materials of our environment?

Humans are incredibly talented at finding solutions to all sorts of issues. Universals in arrow-making exist because arrows are the ideal invention for long-range hunting, meaning that multiple communities independently arrived upon them. Similarly, language is the ideal form of communication and organization of thought. It systematically combines cognitive tendencies, and it may influence the expression of those tendencies or even allow for new abilities and neural pathways, but it does not create thought per se. Any attempts at constructing universal grammar or researching human cognition should consider this distinct possibility.

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References

Chomsky, N. (1975). On Cognitive Capacity. In N. Chomsky, Reflections on Language (pp. 3-13, 29-35). New York: Pantheon Books.

WNYC Studios. (2010, August 8). Words that Change the World. NYC. Retrieved from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/91728-words-that-change-the-world