The reading by Lupyan is an experiment about the concept of abstraction. The experiment discusses that our mental representations of concepts change based on how those concepts are activated in the first place. For instance, the word ‘triangle’ tends to evoke a more prototypical mental image of a triangle than the words ‘three-sided figure’, even though both descriptions are considered “pragmatically equivalent.” Despite these differences, and the fact that each of these mental representations of ‘triangle’ are specific instances of the word and not the abstract concept, we are still able to communicate abstractly about the figure.
Meanwhile, the reading by Rickford talks about the unequal relationship between the field of sociolinguistics and the African American speech community. Rickford claims that the field of sociolinguistics has gained much from the study of African American Vernacular English but has given little in return to the African Americans; thus, linguists should find more ways to give back to this community. Rickford proposes certain activities to address this need, such as increasing employment for African-Americans in linguistics, improving the way the African-American community is represented in writing, among others (182).
Initially, the readings seemed unrelated, but after giving some thought to the ideas presented, I believe that the former reading – the one by Lupyan – indirectly highlights an important issue that is addressed in the latter reading – the one by Rickford. Lupyan highlights the tendency for words to evoke mental prototypes of certain concepts. These protoypes influence the way we think and infer. Based on real life uses of the word and its descriptions, it seems that our mental prototype (at least mine) of what ‘research’ entails, is mostly a discovery (and often applied) approach to the disciplines we want to know more about. But when researching societies, few times do we think of research as a mutual relationship between the research and the researched. Researchers compensate individuals for participating in their studies, but few times do we actively look for ways to help those societies in ways beyond the research itself. It seems like Rickford’s claims, however, push us to recognize that we should actively seek to change the current prototypical concept of what societal research entails; it should be thought of as a mutual relationship and not a one-way relationship. I believe that if this is to be done, then choosing words wisely when describing the purpose of this type of research in universities, around the world, etc. can help substantially. In the same way that using the expression ‘three-sided figure’ evoked a slightly different image of the prototypical triangle, new words should be repeatedly used to describe what research is. These new words should emphasize the mutual-relationship that Rickford claims is necessary.
And building off of your idea of how we need to be careful in our word choice when describing research, linguistics potentially has the ability to change people's internal representations of the world through careful selection. Not only could linguists change the face of the field by altering how we think of research, but further research into mental representations of ideas could give us the tools to influence what people think of when they read the phrase "African American communities". Right now, there are a lot of people who think that college students are too sensitive about triggering words and that there it too great an emphasis in society to be "PC". However, if the internal representations that we attach to "triangle" are different than those we attach to "three-sided polygon", maybe the shift to less triggering, more intentional descriptors really can improve our society.
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