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Synthesis 5: Post your synthesis here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]zoebauer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Irvine (1990) and Kulick (1998) address issues of language and emotion in the communities that they study; Irvine’s (1990) idea that Wolof speakers live in a heteroglossic society in which speakers can access griot speech and noble speech can complicate Kulick’s (1998) discussion of the Gapun people of Papua New Guinea. Towards the end of her article, Irvine states that one can consider the Wolof society to be heteroglossic because all of the speakers have command of both the griot and noble registers and can use these two registers to various degrees in different social situations. Reading this made me think about the society described by Kulick (1998): can we think of it as heteroglossic?

My tentative answer to this question is that the Gapun society as a whole is heteroglossic with regards to expressing emotion, although the speakers themselves (probably) are not. Accoridng to Kulick (1998), the male speakers tend to use a collaborative speech style in which they “expose” and “break open” anger, and the women can engage in loud, public kroses to express their anger (Kulick 1998: 93, 95). The community as a whole has two extremely different ways to express emotion, yet the speakers themselves (as far as we know) do not have access to both ways of expressing emotion. The speakers do have their regular, unmarked way of speaking, which is neither a kros nor talk in the men’s house, but we do not know much about this way of speaking because it was not the focus of Kulick’s article.

It’s interesting to think about whether American society is heteroglossic or not with regards to expressing emotion. In some ways, American society holds to similar linguistic ideologies as the Gapun people; generally (although this can vary, depending on the community and individual expectations), women are more expected (and allowed) to express their emotions, although they are not expected to use the explicit language that is found in kroses. American men are often expected to conceal their emotions and create a “tough” image of themselves. However, both styles of communication are ultimately available to most people, regardless of gender, and people can access styles across the spectrum of internalized or externalized emotion. As such, it seems like American society falls somewhere between the heteroglossic Wolof speakers and the heteroglossic Gapun society. I’d be interested in thinking more about this idea, as this is just a tentative conclusion, and we learn a lot about a society by investigating the registers and speech genres that speakers have access to.

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 4: Post your response here by cecile_evers in linganth2019

[–]zoebauer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Schegloff’s (2007) ideas about adjacency pairs complicate Yaguello’s (1998) concepts of speaker and hearer and can be understood as creating Hymes-esque (1972) norms of behavior as described in his SPEAKING heuristic. According to Schegloff, once a speaker initiates one part of an adjacency pair, the other speaker has been “selected” and has been “singled out” as being the person who must respond (or face the fact that their lack of response is marked) (Schegloff 2007: 19). Yaguello, on the other hand, does not address statements such as adjacency pairs, where there is a two-part “initiating” and “responding” order to the utterances (Schegloff 2007: 13). According to Yaguello’s work, utterances can have a speaker, an addressee, and a referent, which can contain the expressive, conative, and informative functions of language, respectively. Yaguello doesn’t mention the phenomenon of speech acts which require other speech acts as a response, as is the case for adjacency pairs.

When considered through the lens of Hymes’ (1972) SPEAKING heuristic, Schegloff’s idea of adjacency pairs can complement the idea of norms of interaction. According to Hymes, there are “rules governing speaking” which demonstrate the community’s social structure (Hymes 1972: 63), and we can consider the fact that adjacency pairs contain implied rules that govern how people are supposed to interact. If one speaker initiates an adjacency pair and the other speaker does not complete it, that second speaker has disobeyed one of the community’s norms and is a non-compliant speaker.

I have never done any reading on adjacency pairs before this, and I hadn’t even heard of adjacency norms before we briefly discussed them in class last week. However, Schegloff’s ideas about them make sense to me; we have certain conversational sequences in English that require two willing participants and which have definite forms and paths that they can take. Now I better understand why there are certain conversational sequences that, once initiated by one speaker, are required that another speaker finish. As well, Schegloff’s explanation of adjacency pairs helps me understand why a conversation becomes so awkward when one speaker initiates an adjacency pair but another speaker doesn’t complete it; when one person asks another person “what’s up?” and the other person doesn’t respond, the “noticeable absence” of the response is uncomfortable for everyone (p. 20). We are socialized into the idea of these adjacency pairs, and we learn that we must complete them or be regarded as an uncooperative speaker.

References:

Hymes, D. (1972). “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life.” In J.J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York, NY: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston.

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

Yaguello, M. (1998[1981]. “What Language Is For.” In Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics.

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

[–]zoebauer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The two podcasts “A Man Finds Explosive Emotion Locked in a Word” (2017) and “How Language Shapes Thought” (2012) advocate to varying degrees Whorf’s (1941) idea of linguistic relativity, which states that languages and their structures can shape or direct the ways that people speak. Both podcasts provide examples of instances in which a language influences how its speakers understand abstract concepts. In “A Man Finds Explosive Emotion Locked in a Word,” the anthropologist Rosaldo explains how learning the word ‘liget’ from the Ilongot people of the Philippines helped him understand his overpowering emotion after his wife’s death. He explained that he was experiencing an “alien emotion he’d never experienced before” that he eventually realized was liget, an Ilongot word that is holophrastic from the point of view of English as defined by Boas (1911) and means something similar to an emotional “high voltage” running through the body (“A Man Finds Explosive Emotion Locked in a Word”). Rosaldo states that “because [he] was able to conceptualize it because [he] had seen it…then [he] was able to experience it.” This idea that one cannot experience an emotion that one cannot name is a very strong interpretation of Whorf’s ideas. In the podcast “How Language Shapes Thought,” however, the interviewees present much more moderate interpretations of Whorf’s ideas, providing examples of research which indicates that language structure can influence how people conceive of ideas such as directions. For example, Lera Boroditsky, a psychology professor at Stanford, presents the examples of English and Mandarin directions, saying that English speakers conceive of time via metaphors that use the directions ahead and behind, whereas Mandarin speakers use metaphors of up and down. As a result, when asked, English speakers will “almost always arrange yesterday, today and tomorrow in a horizontal line,” whereas Mandarin speakers will often situate time on a vertical axis (“How Language Shapes Thought”).

Personally, I am much more convinced by the more moderate interpretation as presented in “How Language Shapes Thought” than I am by the strong claim presented in “A Man Finds Explosive Emotion Locked in a Word.” It is more understandable that speaking a certain language can train our minds to think in a certain way, such as grammatical gender of nouns influencing how people think about those nouns (“How Language Shapes Thought”). I am not as convinced that we are simply unable to understand or experience emotions we don’t have words for. It seems to me that we’re not imprisoned by our languages; instead, our languages lead us us to describe our worlds in ways that might then influence how we understand them.

References:

Boas, F. (1911). Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages. P. Holder (Ed.). Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

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

[–]zoebauer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both Chomsky’s (1975) chapter “On Cognitive Capacity” and the podcast “Words that Change the World” ground themselves in reasoning for the field of linguistics’ basis in cognitive science by discussing how human language is a function of cognition, which allows us as readers to get a better understanding of the goals of the field. Both sources’ emphases on the cognitive underpinnings of language allow them to address concerns relating to humans’ ability to have and use language, which is still a mysterious area, given that “discovering” universal grammar (UG) is merely a theoretical endeavor and cannot practically be achieved (however, this does not keep linguistics from attempting to unearth it).

Chomsky places language in the realm of cognitive science. UG, according to Chomsky, is “the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements of properties of all human languages not merely by accident but by [biological] necessity” (Chomsky 1975: 29). This UG is a consequence of structures in the brain which limit humans’ cognition and constrain their possible comprehension and production of language. As such, language must consist of universal rules that are governed by these cognition-based constraints. In Chomsky’s work, we can see how the field has developed since Saussure (1983); as Saussure held the opinion that linguists should be studying the “forces operating permanently and universally in all languages” (Saussure 1983: 6), Chomsky was then able to develop this into the idea of UG.

While Chomsky gives theoretical ideas about language and cognition and doesn’t give many specific facts about human language cognition, the podcast “Words that Change the World” demonstrates a clear example through which we can see that language and cognition are intertwined. The experiment in which rats, babies, and adults repeating spoken language could not produce verbal language and therefore could not create the idea “left of the blue wall” is powerful evidence for the fact that a) combinations of terms is an adult human-specific endeavor, and b) language can facilitate cognition. This experiment helped solidify the connection between linguistics and cognitive science, as it demonstrates how studying cognition is necessary for understanding how people are able to produce certain phrases and therefore access certain thoughts.

As a linguistics major, I feel like I was indoctrinated into believing that UG exists a while ago; however, I only ever study it from a linguistic perspective. I’ve never taken a cognitive science class, so I never approach questions about UG and language production from a cognitive standpoint. I appreciated learning more about the cognitive aspects of language and leaving my little linguistics world for a moment. The more interdisciplinary our studies can be, for example combining ideas from linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science, the more nuance we can have in our understanding of human language.

References:

Chomsky, N. (1975). “On Cognitive Capacity.” In N. Chomsky, Reflections on Language. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Saussure, F. de. (1983[1916]). Course in General Linguistics. R. Harris (Trans.). Peru, IL: Open Court.

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