Linguistics + Social Good?

The Lupyan reading discussed how we conceptualize an entity that can take on many forms, such as a triangle.  It turns out that people conceptualize triangles differently depending on the linguistic cue they're given.  Interestingly enough, people told to draw a triangle will almost always draw an equilateral "canonical" triangle, while people told to draw a three-sided polygon are more likely to draw a triangle that isn't canonical.  Further, people are able to identify canonical triangles more quickly as triangles and even associate canonical triangles more closely with "triangle" than other triangles.

The Rickford reading discusses how linguistics should be used to benefit African American and Creole communities, such as for improving reading education for African American children.  Rickford goes on to describe notable features of AAVE and how they've guided much sociolinguistic research; for example, AAVE let us discover that African Americans of higher-class backgrounds tend to use fewer AAVE English features (such as multiple negation, copula absence, etc.).  In return, sociolinguistics has helped AAVE get recognized as an official dialect, but Rickford argues that more must be given back.  More African Americans need to enter linguistics, and their dialect should be correctly represented; further, the fact that AAVE-speaking job applicants are discriminated against is disturbing.

These two readings both represent sociolinguistics, albeit in radically different ways.  Nonetheless, after thinking about the readings some more, I started noticing some connections.  Both readings talk about variations to a standard dialect (English, in this case) and the effects they have on our perceptions.  Perhaps asking an AAVE speaker to take a "white English" IQ test is slightly uncomfortable for the AAVE speaker in the same way that immediately identifying a non-canonical triangle is for one of the Mechanical Turks in the Lupyan study.  So maybe we could use linguistics to translate IQ tests into AAVE and other major dialects so that everyone's intelligence can be tested in their "canonical dialect."  On another note, the one major difference between the readings is that the Rickford one called much more for social change than the Lupyan reading, which seemed to focus more on building academic literature.

I found the Lupyan reading especially relatable to my life outside of linguistics.  Back in high school, I used to be somewhat passionate about computer science.  In CS, there's a concept called inheritance, where a programmer can make an abstract superclass that branches out into different subclasses.  If memory serves, you can't create an instance of an abstract class.  So I was thinking that "triangle" could be considered a superclass for "equilateral triangle," "isosceles triangle," etc.  In the CS example, asking the computer to create a triangle object (without any other specifics) would cause it to freak out, but we as humans need a way to handle such situations.  So perhaps humans are preprogrammed to default to the canonical equilateral triangle when asked to draw a triangle since, although arbitrary, it's the most common kind of triangle in our lives.  More broadly, perhaps every abstract word like "triangle" is its own superclass in the brain, waiting for a call to the default method or a more specific instantiation.