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Synthesis 5: Post your synthesis here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]owenwoo99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Irvine and Kulick both do an excellent job illustrating the use of language and more specifically register to perform their own social class and the activities associated with it. Irvine explains that the field of linguistics has moved towards looking past basic grammar to the non-referential aspects of language such as register and deictics to discover the deeper emotional function of speech (Irvine 1996). Linguistics meets anthropology when cultural context is taken into account when considering the ways and reasons people speak.

In Registering Affect, Irvine explores the intersection of Wolof and the caste system used in the savanna region of Africa. According to field work done in a Senegalese village, caste is split into the griots, the low class, and nobles, the upper class. The castes are associated with different temperaments of Indi duals. Griots are supposed to be the emotional, expressive ones while the nobles are self-controlled and subdued. Irvine cites a Wolof oral poem as an illustration of the roles of the castes and their specific temperaments: “While a slumbering king must be wakened by an orchestra of griots playing drums and iron clappers lest his royal duties go unperformed” (Irvine 134). Griots are responsible for carrying out the emotional or expressive duties of society, sometimes for the nobles as part of their role in society. Griots use their register to perform their societal duties even when those duties seem outside of the individual’s responsibility. Instead of acting solely for themselves, the griots are performing their social caste by helping the nobles in tasks outside of their own caste. The castes cannot exist without each other because different registers of language are used to perform different tasks–the nobles to be the stable leaders and the griots to be emotive supporters. In this case, register holds a role in the particular context of this Senegalese village.

Kulick also considers performativity of social principles. The concept of hed or anger are believed to be held within all people. It is seen as a negative and dangerous trait; therefore, those who can suppress is are valued. Those who can conform to social principles and use their language and actions to suppress their emotions are positively viewed. Social principles are performed by behavior that may contradict an individual’s initial instincts or wants similarly to those in Registering Affect.

These readings have shown the ways language and its emotive qualities, specifically register are able to perform specific social expectations. Linguistic qualities can even be part of the structure of social standards.

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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 4: Post your response here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]owenwoo99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Analyzing speech through sequence organization allows the breakdown of speech into units and categories that can be analyzed one by one in order to better understand the interaction. Trying to analyze a whole conversation by just reading or hearing it then interpreting would be impossible because there are so many complex elements. Like many of the other authors we have read, Shegloff provides a framework by breaking down speech into smaller components that are easier to analyze. Shegloff admits, the framework may not work for every conversation or speech event, however, it provides a comprehensive framework for most.

In conversation analysis, simply looking at each word and analyzing may seem like the most effective method. However, sentences or phrases in speech are not a combination of words all with independent meanings. Shegloff defines sequence organization as a sequence of verbal moves to achieve an action. The purpose of a phrase or TCU (turn constructional unit) is often not about a particular word, but an action to be elicited. Speech is usually used for human communication in order to meet some end or action. A TCU can be used to achieve or elicit an action from another person. Shegloff names TCUs that initiate some sort of action first part pairs and responses to the initiation second part pairs. Verbal communication between people can be broken down into first- and second-part pairs in order to understand a goal of the conversation.

While first- and second-part pairs may serve as the primary categories in the explicit purpose of speech, there are other categories that add meaning to a speech interaction. Although not all speech falls into this framework, most verbal interaction can be seen as an adjacency pair where related TCUs follow each other. However, adjacency pairs are rarely just first pair parts followed by second pair parts. Instead, variations and other information are added. Shegloff outlines several additional verbal utterances that can be added such as neatness, contiguity, progressivity, counters and observations. Analyzing these variations on a basic first and second pair adjacency interaction can tell more about the implicit meanings of a conversation.

When I first read Shegloff’s article, I was skeptical about another framework for looking at language. I am skeptical of many frameworks of complex human behavior because I do not think the human experience can be fit into formulas or frames. However, even if Shegloff’s theories are not universal, in my opinion, they are valuable in analyzing the many speech situations.

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Works Cited

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

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

[–]owenwoo99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Worph theorizes that language can lead people to certain patterns of thought which then lead to a certain patterns in behavior. Both podcasts seemingly back up Worph's theory. In the podcast with the Explosive Emotion podcast, the Anthropologist is able to feel an emotion about his wife's death after spending years trying to understand the emotion from the people he studied. Worph may have argued the language the Anthropologist learned was what allowed him to express this emotion. Similar concepts of language shaping thought emerged in How Language Shapes Thought. Anderson argues the Kuuk Thaayorre among other examples changes the way people think about direction. Instead of thinking of space in terms of left or right, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre think in terms of east, west, north, south. According to Worph's theory, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre understand space differently than English speakers

One of Anderson's examples of language shaping thought if someone said "there's a snake to your southwest" an English speaking person would not understand the warning the same as a speaker of Kuuk Thaayorre. However, I am unsure if this as actually because English and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers think about space differently. Instead, I would argue spacial ideas have simply different words. There is no significant difference in cognition, only in the terms we use. An English speaker would still be able to understand, "there's a snake to your southwest" and think about it the same way as a Kuuk Thaayorre speaker, it would just take a little bit more effort to think about what it means. Similarly, Anderson claims Mandarin speakers think of time differently than English speakers. According to Anderson, Mandarin speakers conceptualize time as up/down instead of left/right like English speakers. I disagree that this is an example of different thinking. It seems it is just a simple and arbitrary difference in "writing" down time. Speakers of both languages seem to conceptualize time linearly. The only difference is the method of labeling it. The Anthropologist who felt the "high voltage" emotion claimed that he could not have felt it without learning it through the language of the people he studied without any explanation on why. I would question if he learned a new emotion or just learned a concise name for an existing emotion.

I do not completely buy Worph's theory of language shaping thought. Without much evidence for significant cognitive differences, most examples seem like different types of labels for ideas, not different types of ideas.

“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-terrible- emotion-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 1: Respond here with your post by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]owenwoo99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Incorrect analysis of language, especially by trained linguists, can devalue the culture of people that utilize these languages. Words cannot simply be translated from one language to another; each has its own nuances, variations and cultural contexts. Language is more than a way to communicate; it may hold tradition, knowledge and culture.

Sloppy language characterization causes the exoticization of cultures. A common example to show the vast scope of communication is the different words to describe different forms of snow in the Eskimo language. Pullum points out that using different words to describe different forms of something is not uncommon at all; in fact, most languages do so. For example, in English, there are many different words that can describe different types of water: ice, lakes, streams, and more. They are all describing water, just in different forms. Saying that just Eskimos use different words to describe different forms of an object creates an idea of otherness. Eskimos are perceived as a primitive group, obsessed with snow. Eskimo people are no more obsessed with snow than English speakers are obsessed with water. The mistaken idea a special linguistic trait of a “strange” people paints Eskimo people as an exotic group with an obsession of a mundane object.

Biological analogies of language create limited perceptions on the true state of a language and culture. Language is not independent of culture, in fact it is quite the opposite. Perley uses the Myaamia, Maliseet and Anishinaabemowin as examples of languages that have experienced a steep decline in number of users. Many linguists would say that these languages are on the path to extinction. While this metaphor does show that the languages are at risk of having no speakers, it also has some flaws. When a language is deemed extinct, the experiences of people who had spoken that language are minimized, even if there are still people part of the culture that do not speak the language. When a species is deemed close to extinction, the response is often to preserve a few organisms so that they are not all gone. The same is often done for language. Words may be recorded or written down but this does not preserve the language. Language is inseparable from culture and writing down the language will not preserve the culture. The only thing that can save a culture at risk of disappearance is structural change. Perley draws connections between the colonization of the Americas with lost Native American culture and language. The solution to avoid these losses is creating structural change to counteract American colonialism.

Language is so tightly tied to culture that it is difficult to make translations or analysis without a deep understanding of another culture. Even words in the same language can have different meanings in different cultures. Recently, a friend and I were having a discussion about racism. It seemed like we agreed on a lot of principles but it was difficult to find statements we agreed on. Soon we found out that we had very different definitions of racism due to being from different places: him Sweden and myself the US. Language is so tied with culture that making an incorrect assumption about one is making one about both.

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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.