Rickford and Lupyan

Rickford: This paper focuses on an asymmetry between what the African American speech community has given to sociolinguistics and what sociolinguistics has given back to the African American speech community. Rockford highlights some specific benefits linguists have accrued by studying African American communities: In particular, the study of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) has been invaluable in better understanding the correlation between aspects of speech and social class. However, Rickford notes that some writers have done a disservice to the African American community by potentially perpetuating harmful stereotypes (like, for instance, African American men being portrayed as criminal or extremely lustful). In addition, African Americans are extremely underrepresented in sociolinguistics. Towards the end of the paper, Rickford, instead of suggesting that we abstain from collecting data from AAVE full stop, rather suggests some strategies for what linguists can do to give back.

Lupyan: This paper discusses the problem of abstraction as it pertains to triangles. Roughly, the problem amounts amounts to explaining how we can form the idea of and think of a perfectly general triangle, when all we have acquantice with are particular triangles. Plato’s answer was that our soul had access to the world of Being (wherein reside the sempiternal Forms that constitute the truly real), where our soul was able to learn of the Form of triangles, thus allowing us to ‘recollect’ the perfectly general triangle once we are born and come into contact with particular triangles that ‘remind’ us of it. But this answer isn’t found quite as convincing as it used to be (if it ever really was). Instead, cognitive scientists have argued that we represent triangles in a symbolic format specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership. Lupyan shows that there are some problems with this model by demonstrating the context dependence of our representations (‘context’ should not really matter if the classical Cognitive science picture were correct).

The two readings seem quite distant at first: Rickford’s is a practical call to action, whereas Lupyan’s is about as abstract as it gets (it is, after all, literally about abstract objects). Lupyan makes you consider the context dependence of representations of concepts, i.e., the fact that concepts are activated in different ways depending on, for instance, the specific word used (e.g., “triangle” vs “3 sided polygon’) - but if different speech communities have substantially different vocabularies, then it may well be that these communities’s concepts are activated in substantially different ways, meaning that their entire way of thinking of the world is different (since a concept is usually conceived of as a constituent of a thought). If this is the case, then the sociolinguist’s task of tracing out the differentiation of speech across communities takes on an extra layer of significance.