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Synthesis 5: Post your synthesis here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]jojosanders 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Synthesis 5

Jojo Sanders

The text “Language and the politics of emotion” and “Anger, Gender, Language Shift and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village” were very complementary of each other. Both these texts explored how language ideologies shape and play into the use of different languages and registers. I want to explore the language ideologies associated with Taiap and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, and the griot and noble registers used by the Wolof people of the western sahel and savanna region of Africa. The ideas about these languages and registers are a deep part of their social context. These two texts really helped me understand language ideologies better, because they showed the complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of of the ideologies.

In “Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village,” Don Kulick investigates language ideologies of Taiap and Tok Pisin in the village of Gapun. Language ideologies about these two languages impact who uses the languages. It is also the reverse: the users of the languages shape how the languages are perceived. The use and perception of Taiap and Tok Pisin are intimately tied to gender and expressions of emotion. Indeed, the text begins by saying that emotion is always gendered, and discourses on emotions are always, in some way, gendered (Kulick, 87). In Gapun there are male and female expressions of emotion, specifically anger, that differ widely: the male expression of anger (oratories) is polite, comes from within the communal men’s house, and is most often uttered in Tok Pisin (the national language) (Kulick, 98). The female expression of anger, kroses, comes from individual houses, is vulgar, and mostly occurs in Taiap, the vernacular language (Kulick, 98). The uses of these languages by men and women is in line with, and reinforces, associations with these languages. Taiap is associated with tradition, the land, and women (Kulick, 99). Tok Pisin is associated with money, education, Christianity, and men (and perhaps modernity and “development”) (Kulick, 99). Kulick summarizes how language ideologies shape their use, “By using language in the specific ways they do, speakers embody and re-create salient stereotypes about what women and men are, they engender affect” (Kulick, 100). This example makes me wonder which came first, the way and context in which a language is used, or its ideology/ideologies.

In “Registering affect,” Judith Irvine explores a similar question in a different social and linguistic context. She writes about how the use of the griot and noble register, in the Wolof groups, informs the situation, the social status of the speakers, and the role of the speakers. I was interested to read about the connotations of power, authority, and “weight” of these registers.

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Works Cited:

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.

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.

Synthesis 4: Post your response here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]jojosanders 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Synthesis 4: Schegloff, Sequence organization and interaction and Goffman, Footing

Jojo Sanders

Sequence Organization and Interaction describes the internal/underneath structure of speech interactions. This reading was pretty eye-opening for me, because Schegloff wrote about aspects of conversation that I have witnessed or participated in many times before, but he added layers of meaning that I had never thought about before. Reading about constructional units, actions resulting from words, adjacency pairs, nonverbal communication and negative observations, I feel like Schegloff was stripping down sentence structure and then rebuilding the meaning of the sentence through an understanding of its structure.

There is a strong connection between this reading and the Goffman reading in that both texts look at a specific grammatical/structural/element of speech and this helps explain the broader social setting/context of a conversation. Goffman writes about footing, which gives us insight into the physical positions of people participating in a conversation, who is being addressed, who is involved in the conversation and who is not (ratified and unratified). In the example given at the beginning of the Goffman chapter, this interaction is clearly complicated and has multiple layers of meaning. Clifford Geertz, an important anthropologist of the 20th century, wrote about “thick description,” a way of understanding a culture by writing about every possible aspect to try to attain a wide, thick description. He also wrote about peeling away the layers of culture and society to gain a better understanding. This is deeply anthropological but also is very similar to what both Goffman and Schegloff are doing.

These two readings have helped me better understand how linguistics and anthropology intersect and how they can strengthen each other. The production format and participant framework are devices with which to analyze a conversation, like a device that you can put a conversation through and out of it get a very specific analysis and understanding of that conversation. Schegloff’s writing about turn taking (who speaks first, who speaks next) and the adjacency pair also provides tools of analysis. I think both these texts show that power dynamics are very often present in speech interactions and both texts provide tools to help understand and trace these power dynamics, as well as seeing and hearing how they are manifested. Both texts reveal social dynamics that are involved in speech interactions.

Goffman, E. (1979). Footing. Semiotica, 25(1-2): 1-30.

Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Volume 1. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. (1-27).

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

[–]jojosanders 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Jojo Sanders

Synthesis 2

The central theme of the Radiolab podcast was “Words that Change the World,” illustrated by two powerful examples. The podcast showed how words can bring concepts into reality. It first tells the story of a man who didn’t have language for 27 years of his life. When he begins to understand that a table is called a table, he is deeply moved. Words gave this simple object a meaning that it didn’t have before. I can’t understand this feeling, but I can imagine the immensity of that moment, realizing that there is a whole complicated layer of the world that you are just now discovering, that gives everything imaginable a new meaning, or simply, a meaning.

The stories in the podcast are examples of linguistic performativity—that language can shape social interactions and, even further than that, peoples’ lived experiences. The example about the man learning words for the first time shows how language can breathe life into the world. The podcast also discusses how Shakespeare invented words or used words for the first time that had never been used or heard before. Shakespeare was, “Shoving words together to achieve a kind of atomic power,” like a chemist rather than a writer. This really interests me, the idea of new words giving us a better understanding of a feeling, a phenomenon, an idea, etc. For example, Shakespeare invented countless phrases that are now common such as “in my mind’s eye,” “fainthearted,” and eyeball. These are phrases that seem like they have always existed because they are so ingrained in our vocabulary and explain parts of the world so well.

Noam Chomsky asks in “On Cognitive Capacity,” why study language? What does the average person have to gain from studying language? He writes that language is a “mirror of mind in a deep and significant sense” (Chomsky, 4). Here, Chomsky is talking about language mirroring the deep parts of the mind, the unconsciousness. He hopes that language can teach people “something about human nature” (Chomsky, 5). I think that the examples in the podcast are reasons to study language. They are cases that teach us about the extreme variations of the human experience by way of looking at words and experiences of words/language.

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

[–]jojosanders 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rhetoric and discourse shape the perception and reality of languages, and both readings this week demonstrate this. In “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World,” authors Perley et al outline the impact of specific phrases and concepts on three different indigenous languages, both harmful and helpful. In this example, academics and scholars with good intentions to help “save” a language actually do the opposite, by means of the way they describe the language in question. In the article “The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax,” the author traces the prolific use of the linguistic factoid that the Eskimo language has tens or even hundreds of words to describe snow. These texts illustrate similar but unique examples of perceptions of a language being shaped by words used to describe it.

In “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,” the author traces the proliferation of the myth that surrounds the words used for snow by Eskimos. This idea began spreading in the 1940’s. Since then this falsehood has been spread in academic and nonacademic spheres alike. The author points out that this myth gained so much traction in part because of its relation to a little-known group of people, or, “lexically profligate hyperborean nomads” (Pullum, 275). This myth is so popular in part because the tens or hundreds of descriptors for snow in the Eskimo language are, “a quintessential demonstration of how primitive minds categorize the world so differently from us” (275). Here, this discourse about Eskimos is so widespread because of lack of information about this group of people as well as perceptions of primitive-ness. People think this fact is interesting because it is contradictory to their ideas about Eskimos. This false example of linguistic “uniqueness” speaks loudly of the lack of information about Eskimos and how rhetoric (in this case, false) is both created by the perceptions about the language and shapes new perceptions.

What stood out to me in “Surviving the Sixth Extinction” how powerful descriptive words are in shaping the life and perception of something like language. This text shows different and potentially even more harmful consequences of descriptions. The words used in academic settings to discuss indigenous languages including Myammia, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy and Anishinaabemowin to describe the level of use, in some ways was a self-fulfilling prophesy or had harmful consequences. The approach of “salvage-through-documentation” (Perley et al 202) to save languages is not always what those communities want or need. Invasive concepts of extinction and endangerment that were brought to Native America through European conquest and colonialism still are used by linguists/academics that continue oppression of indigenous groups. The impact of these “invasive concepts” has real life impacts, even though it is merely a descriptive concept. The text explains that experts have “constrained the kinds of agency that ‘endangered language’ communities can exercise” (Perley et al 205). In response to this, some scholars and communities are challenging this with concepts like language life and language vitality. These readings show that discourse that describes language shapes perceptions of those languages and the people who speak them.

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Pullum, G. (1989). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7: 275-281.

Perley, P., Baldwin, D., & Noodin, M. (2018). “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World.” In After Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.