In the abstract of his article, Rickford makes clear his
thesis that despite the African American speech community bringing a lot of
knowledge to the field of sociolinguistics through our ability to observe its
rich instantiation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), linguistics
does not do enough in return.
He spends the first part of his article explaining how one
of the most distinct variations of American English – AAVE – has given much
food for analysis and development of methodologies and theories over the past
few decades, through examination of narratives and speech events that
illuminate variable rule systems, differing ways to demarcate tense, and how
all of it relates to central ideas of sociolinguistics.
He then launches into his argument that the African American
community does not receive fair remuneration for this service that they provide
to the scientific study, narrowing in on deficiencies in the teaching of
language arts and reading at the elementary level, and suggesting that lack of
linguistic involvement becomes prevalent in court, unemployment, and
imprisonment disparities, to name a few.
Meanwhile, in the abstract of his article, Lupyan talks about, well, abstraction! His article
discusses the fascinating phenomenon concerning the humble triangle in which the
synonymous phrasing of two different requests to draw a triangle results in
statistically significant nuances in the drawn figures.
Ultimately, Lupyan showed that our mental “abstractions” –
using a triangle as an example – take the form of various prototypes that belong
to that concept, canonical representations that we modulate depending on the
language involved in evoking the images. I wonder, applying Lupyan’s discussion
to Rickford’s, if being conscious of the slight nuances used in how we
address African American communities and all those we study as linguists – the names
we call them, the questions we ask, the credit we give – can help to alleviate
the gap in reciprocal benefit.
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