Rickford
and Lupyan both address the social impact of linguistics, but in different
ways. Rickford establishes the responsibility of the linguistics community to address
the “unequal partnership between researcher and researched” (161)., while
Lupyan elaborates on the role of language in giving us access to representations
of concepts.
Specifically, Lupyan brought up the
idea that verbal cues provide a mechanism for people to generalize necessarily
specific experiences into a more abstract, prototypical representation. That
words allow us to create and access something general or ideal, which is
impossible to do with specific examples alone. His statement at the end of the
paper is striking: “in a sense, all concepts are ad hoc concepts” (18).
The differences in cueing using
words with equivalent meaning (“triangle” vs “three-sided polygon”) demonstrate
that our internal representations and ability to recognize and categorize are
based on context, on the most familiar representations of a concept. I wonder
about the effect of this process (words providing a way to link features of
several specific experiences) in the media. When seeing a word like “beautiful”
repeatedly with certain perceptual experiences (seeing slender Caucasian
women), does our ideal representation of a word change? If we cannot have a
prototype of a concept independent on context, what are the dangers of
constantly being exposed to concepts like beauty, health, or desirability
within a certain, often limiting context portrayed by the media?
It's fascinating to think about whether exposure to media changes our "ideal representation" of beauty and how we use the word "beauty" in speech. I wonder how differently speakers of English in different locations (like the UK, US, Canada, and Australia) would describe beauty in different contexts, and how much of that would be due to media exposure.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting concept. It makes me wonder to what extent the very words we use can create unconscious bias. Many words in English, for example, reflect a cultural stigma against left handed people. The word dexterous, which means skillful, is derived from the Latin word for "right," while the words sinister, which means ominous, and gauche, which means awkward, come from the Latin and French words for "left." When the stigma of left-handedness was more pronounced, did using words like this reinforce this stigma?
ReplyDelete