Lupyan & Rickford Response

Honestly, I was first taken aback that John Locke had analyzed triangles philosophically, and the seemingly simple concept of a triangle has such weight linguistically. I had only ever considered triangles from a mathematical perspective. It's interesting to realize that an abstract triangle may just be a combination of all the triangles we have seen - a conglomeration triangle, perhaps a platonic form, that is actually derived from our experiences and commonalities between 'triangles.' It relates to what we studied in Psych 45 about memory, and how much of memory seems to be strengthening of neural connections, and when these strengths are strong enough, we can clearly categorize an apple as an apple - but is this based off a perfect conception of an apple in our mind, or based off the commonalities between all the apples we've encountered? If there is a perfect conception of an 'apple' or 'triangle' in our mind, it makes total sense that we would label some triangles and apples as 'better' forms of the object. Yet this is indeed threatened by the how using different verbal cues elicits a different ideal form of a triangle. The ambiguity that language allows complicates the ideal image of truly anything - from a guitar to a dog. The seemingly subtle input change of "triangle" and "three sides" drastically changed results - showing a strong linguistic impact on the results. Even using "triangle" over "three-sided figures" resulted in actual changed perception - meaning people truly viewed the shapes to be more equilateral. The linguistic power to influence perception - both internal processing and external processing of what we see - is clearly noticeable.

While I was very interested in the Lupyan article from a SymSys perspective, the Rickford article was incredibly relevant timely given the current issues we face today. The "unequal partnership" in many arenas of today's world is even visible in linguistics. Rickford first, importantly, establishes African language as equally valid, rich, and complex. He describes its "systematic structure, and fascinating, interconnected histories." Rickford starts by outlining the roots of American sociolinguistics, and how this branched into Harlem. He continues onto to describe variable rules and to alert the reader that social class linguistic studies are rare. Rickford discusses the emphasis on vocal delivery - narratives and speeches - in African American speech, ranging from rapping, hip-hop language, sounding, and more. To me, this seems to relate to the varying preaching styles between church as the delivery changes how powerful the message is conveyed for me.  I also found it interesting to hear that "grammaticalization" is an actual recognized process - as in tech, it is interesting to me that start-ups often choose names that can easily become a verb (Yelp, Google, etc). In short, I found the reading interesting as it is rarely recognized how unique, interesting, and equally compex less analyzed languages are.