Response to Lupyan & Rickford

Although the readings for this week did not introduce us to new technical concepts in linguistics, they were a good reminder of why we even study this field. Lupyan’s paper focused on psychological phenomena as byproducts of language, while Rickford’s paper studied the social implications of linguistics.

Lupyan’s paper references a study in which there are two groups of participants: a group that is asked to “Draw a triangle” and a group that is asked to “Draw a three sided polygon”. The two requests are semantically similar and hence we expect to get similar results from both groups. However, this is not the case. The group that was asked to draw a triangle tended to draw either an equilateral triangle or an isosceles triangle with a horizontal base, whereas there was more variation in the triangles drawn by the second group. The results suggest that while a word can refer to many different instances of a type - there are infinitely many different triangles to draw - the prototypical triangle is actually very similar for different people. At the same time however, the concept of a three sided polygon - practically meaning the same thing as a triangle - does not hold the same idea for people and hence the variation we get in the drawings. The findings from this study are significant because they show how people’s perception of what is said and to some extent their actions are affected by the words chosen. Reading this paper made the expression “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” make more sense. 

In his paper, Rickford mentions how linguists have a duty to give back to communities that have helped them in their research. The paper talks particularly about speakers of African American Vernacular English. AAVE, because of its diverse styles within English, is studied a lot by linguists in the pursuit of recognizing the root differences between this dialect/ethnolect/sociolect and English. Although there have been attempts by linguists to support the speakers of AAVE through for example the ILT program in courts or by supporting the Oakland Resolution, there is still a lot to be done in this area. Rickford suggests some ways of giving back to these communities in his paper. For example, by encouraging more African Americans to become linguists or by working in soup kitchens.  

The readings for this week were very interesting and it was nice to look at linguistics from a different lens than what we were used to from the readings of previous weeks.