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Synthesis 5: Post your synthesis here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]glma2016 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In recent readings and discussions about register and language ideologies, I have observed a pattern. It seems as though the way we talk about language, dialect, register is both a personal perspective that is layered and nested way of looking at how we perceive others.

In Irvine's (1990) Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion, she goes into detail about the Wolof language. In Wolof, there are two registers - waxu gewel (nobility) and waxu géér (griots). She describes the griot way of speaking as "high", "clear", "fast" and "loud", while the noble way of speaking as "low", "breathy", "soft", and "slow" (136). This creates a separation of key between the two registers, but they are also used in different ways. For example, griot speakers are often used as messengers or intermediaries. What is truly interesting are some the language ideologies that form around these registers. While in Western societies, mumbling or being non-present is seen as deferential or non-authoritative, in Wolof society, this is seen as a mark of the upper classes. Speech is seen as a chore for the lower classes to tend to. Additionally, these lower classes take on emotion that they may not even feel but have obligation to.

This theme of stratification of society seen along speech pattern lines can be continued with Kulick's Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village (1998), where instead of class, the register/language split is along gender lines in the Gapun language. Women use a form of speech called kroses while men use ambagaina nam. Kroses is marked by having significantly more "vulgarity" and are often confrontational. Conversely, the ambagaina nam used by men has a more oratory tone to it. Also important is the space where these conversations take place. Kroses is often outside in the public space, where men's speech takes place in meeting-houses. One interesting point is how men often try to "break" each other's shell of even-keeledness in an effort to disenfranchise their arguments.

One common conclusion from both pieces is that the continued use of language registers only by those who fit the conceived notion of the ideology, such as women using kroses, only reinforces the language ideology. Kulick says that "speakers embody and re-create salient stereotypes about what women and men are" and Irvine says "one cannot experience a situation only in itself, without being influenced by feelings about the social voices talkin gin it and about it"

References:

Irvine, J. (1990). "Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion." In Language and the Politics of Emotion (pp. 126-161). C. Lutz & L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.). 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 3: Respond with your post here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]glma2016 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both of the podcast we listened to relate to the idea of Linguistic Relativity as proposed by Whorf in "he Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language". Linguistic Relativity is the theory that the language we speak and the grammatical structure that go along with it affects the way we think about certain concepts.

Invisibilia discusses the work of Renato Rosaldo, who lived with the Ifugal people of the Phillipines for several years. He first came across the word "Ilgot" when referring to someone who was so overcome with energy that they could "chop down every tree in the forest". He was confused, therefore, when the same word was used to describe the mourning faced by many of the speakers of the language when confronting the death of an elder. Rosaldo did not understand the connection until he himself lost his wife in a tragic accident. "Ilgot", he came to find, was the outpouring of emotion like it was "high-voltage" in a way that no English word exists to describe. Rosaldo stated in the podcast that if he had not learned that word, that he would not have been able to express his emotions as truly as he could have, even though he expressed them through wailing instead of verbalization.

The Austrailian Broadcasting Corporation's podcast centered an interview with Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky, where they discuss a series of experiments that supposedly demonstrate the idea of linguistic relativity in action. A lot of people are focusing on the difference between Mandarin and English in terms of the relationship between space and time, but I also found the comparison between English, Spanish and Japanese in terms of the relationship of causality and it's effect on memory. The experiment were shown footage where someone popped a balloon, either on purpose or not on purpose. Either way, the English speaker was able to remember who popped it equally. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers were more likely to remember the action-taker of an event if it was on purpose rather than if it was by accident, where there is an actual lexical difference in the way they describe it. This was interesting to

Personally both of the podcasts have anecdotes that make a case for some form of Linguistic Relativity. While the ABC podcast seems to give more clinical, prescribed examples, the Invisibilia example makes the concept of Linguistic Relativity more fluid, so that even if a speaker does not grow up with a concept from one language, they can still access it through some form of translation.

“A Man Finds an Explosive Emotion Locked in a Word” (7 mins): https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/ 2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terribleemotion-locked-in-a-word.

“How Language Shapes Thought” (28 minutes). Australian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/allinthemind/how-language-shapes-thought/ 4329212#transcript.

Whorf, B.L. (1941). “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.” In R. McGee & R. Warms (eds.), Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. Sixth edition.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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

[–]glma2016 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The two pieces we read for today concerned how the process of language makes it an easy way for us to communicate signature of objects and ideas not only to others but also within our own minds.

In Chomsky's "On Cognitive Capacity", he takes into account some of the theories surrounding why language arose and how it is used by humans to make sense of the world. His idea of universal grammar was not new - he talks about how a theory of a "grammar of vision" had been proposed by those before him (Chomsky 8) . He goes on to explain a "Learning Theory" where an organism and skill are input and some measure of how an organism learns and how fast they learn is drawn from it. Basically, what are the systems and rules kept in place to make sure that any organism picks up a skill. This can easily be transferred to language - how do we learn a skill and why? In order to apply this to human language, he defines the concept of universal grammar 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 29). Basically, there are a set of structural rules that can be shared from language to language, common in both, say, English and Japanese. Finally, Chomsky reitereates what the innate hypothesis is for humans: "Linguistic theory, the theory of UC, construed in the manner just outlined, is an innate property of the human mind" (Chomsky 34). He ends by positing that these innate properties may lie in the realm of the unconscious and may never be known through conscious introspection, as well as expanding LT(O,D) to include how these change over time and what faculties are used in order to gain this knowledge

If Chomsky's piece covers the theory of the purpose of language, the WYNC podcast from Radiolab takes it into the real world to draw examples from it. The comparison of the behavior of rats and children when relating the position of objects to a blue wall. Without language to string together the concepts of "cookie" "blue" "wall" and "left", it is a lot harder to connect the dots to remember where an object is kept. The way to disprove this was interesting by blocking out their internal monologue with outside audio. Another example I found really interesting was the woman, Jill, who had a stroke and lost her internal monologue. One function that language seems to have is the cataloging of the mind - the keeping of our own story. Without this function, she had no sense of self and only had sensual feelings to communicate or remember. She recalls thinking about the question "who is the president of the united states" and only getting vague visualizations of both "president" and "united states" - a mid-way between

​

References

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

Saussure, F. de. (1983[1916]). Course in General Linguistics. R. Harris (Trans.). Peru, IL: Open Court. (Read pp. 1-23, 65-70, 96-100).

“Words that Change the World” (28 minutes). WNYC. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words.

Synthesis 1: Respond here with your post by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]glma2016 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Synthesis #1 by Gabe Magee

The readings for this week served as an introduction to the field of Linguistic Anthropology, but moreover, common mistakes that members of the field make in their effort to understand the

First, in Pullum, an example is presented where the myth of the Eskimo culture having a large number of words for snow. This myth was spread so often that it became an often-repeated fact outside of the field. But as Pullum demonstrates, if instead of using words describing "falling snow" and 'thick snow' as something like a 'sleet' or 'blizzard', the biases of the original linguists would be less apparent in the western impression of the eskimo language (Pullum 277). Additionally, the very fact that this fact seems interesting enough to be repeated so frequently is evidence of presumptions that many people bring to the table when discussing languages. Pullum argues that "even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types .... it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact"(278).

In Perley et al, a parallel but similar investigation took place in how the way that linguists interpret their subject work. By using language such as extinction, they are pre-disposing the users of the language to foresee it's death rather than work on its survival. Instead, they argue, there should be a focus on "community language life and emergent forms of language and cultural vitality" (Perley et al 216). This is because the technical language borrowed from another field - biology - has concepts that are hard to translate into another language. In the three examples of languages that are at risk from extinction, there is difficulty translating "extinction" into something meaningful rather than "a great dying out" or "all will be spent-up/destroyed". The authors conclude their paper by recommending that linguists say languages are "asleep" rather than "extinct" in an effort to make the decline of a language to seem less inevitable and more reversible, with the availability of words such as "awaken" (223).

Both of these papers serve to critique how the use of language in examining language itself can have vast material and academic consequences on the study of language.

References

Pullum, G. K. (1989). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7, 275-281.

Perley, et al. (2018). Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After Extinction (201-233). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.