I must once again express immense regret at the extremely rushed pace of this class. This week, we're actually skimming over two huge topics at once: sociolinguistics (Rickford's examination of the relationship between the African American community and the academic sociolinguistic community) and semantics (Lupyan's argument that "triangle" doesn't necessarily refer to a mathematical, formal triangle in the minds of native English speakers).
Rickford's essay appears to be more "meta" than not, but in fact, he spends a great deal of the essay outlining recent findings about AAVE (African American Vernacular English), to support one of his claims that the Black community has given a lot to the study of linguistics.. While he only develops the ideas in those findings to a bare minimum, it actually provides a fairly good window into what sociolinguistics appear to do, as the studies he mentions span all of phonology, syntax, and morphology. Furthermore, Rickford's arguments here provide insight into some of the methods that sociolinguists use in gathering data, such as interviews and group sessions, and how their main conclusions are structured (for example, that consonant cluster simplification changes according to changes in social status gradually). At the same time, he criticizes some of those methods, showing how they may unconsciously promote racist views.
However, this is only one side of his argument. Rickford also states that linguists have not done much for the communities they study, especially considering that one of the primary motivations to study them was to help their economic advancement. This part of the paper hints at the status of linguistics in academia and frames a real problem, enhancing the introduction to sociolinguistics. (In fact, I would almost say it was a better choice than giving us a chapter from an intro textbook.)
Using Lupyan's article, on the other hand, has a much less "meta" approach - but for semantics, it seems to fit better. While the core focus on semantics, the meaning of "meaning", appears to be extremely philosophical in nature, the article demonstrates that although the hypotheses may stem from philosophical arguments, the studies can be conducted very objectively: Lupyan has subjects draw triangles and rate triangles based off of various linguistic stimuli, and includes an enormous amount of statistical calculations on that data to prove his point that concepts are not represented abstractly in the brain. Personally, while I don't doubt the data, the sample sizes seem relatively small (I admit, though, that it would be difficult to conduct the experiment on much larger sample sizes) and I'm slightly curious as to whether people who have studied advanced geometry would have a different concept of "triangle".
I'm nearing the 500-word limit, but there's one requirement I haven't really touched - integrating the conceptual information across readings. To be honest, this is pretty hard this week given how there are two different topics and how different the papers are from each other. Perhaps one can be applied to the other? Perhaps the selection of readings is to suggest that we focus on applying the fact that "abstract" thought isn't easy to primary education, in order to give back to our test subjects?
Excellent post. I appreciate the in-depth analysis of both articles, even to their methodology. I was intrigued by your point about advanced geometry. For those who are only used to Euclidean geometry, for example, the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180°, but this doesn't hold in many other cases, like spherical geometry. I suppose that's another qualification to add to the conventional prototype of the triangle!
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