Shapes, Societies, and Sociolinguistics

Lupyan offers us an explanation to the questions that so many of us ask our parents are curious children: What are ideas? Why is a triangle a triangle? Is a “dog” just any four-footed animal? Fortunately for our younger selves, Lupyan answers that these sorts of questions – the ones regarding concepts and how we hold and form such ideas – all have some sort of uniform baseline, even abstract concepts: “Even categories with easily enumerated membership conditions—of which triangles are a paradigmatic case—have a protean nature” (Lupyan 2). He says that our conceptions of categories, of objects, of models of the world “are grounded in sensorimotor and affective states (Lupyan 3),” that every understanding we have of abstract concepts is an amalgamation of individual encounters with a variation of that concept – or, as Lupyan so neatly puts it, “Thoughts about triangles are thoughts about particular triangles” (Lupyan 1). In Experiment 1B, he tested whether the explicitness of instructions (“draw a triangle” vs. “draw a three-sided polygon”) to participants altered the triangles they produced on the screen.

Apparently participants drew more “typical” triangles when asked to draw a triangle; I don’t know if I’d ever considered whether there was an objectively “correct” triangle before (now I’m questioning my own perception of a triangle that appear in my mind’s eye every time I think about it. Drat.). This kind of subjectivity of conceptualization is fascinating, as it demonstrates a question I actually asked on someone else’s blog a few weeks back about just how much our language shapes our thought processes. Since Lupyan debunks the idea that words simply embody preexisting concepts, this kind of ambiguity is further supported.

I’ll admit that I was confused about the supposed connections between Lupyan’s analysis of conceptual construction and Rickford’s support of African-American Vernacular English’s (AAVE’s) contributions to sociolinguistics. Rickford describes how AAVE has helped express both abstract and tangible concepts, such as “social class, ethnicity, network, and style within the quantitative paradigm” (Rickford 5), but he focuses less on the contribution of language to thought formation that intrigued Lupyan and more on how language indicates and fluctuates around preexisting concepts, examining the creole hypothesis and the divergence hypothesis. In particular, Rickford notes that while AAVE has been instrumental in outlining a modern sociolinguistic divides, the sociolinguistic academic community has refused to acknowledge that contribution. Even further, the sociolinguistic field has actively diminished such contributions: “The representation of the African American speech community in the writings of sociolinguists, ethnographers, and folklorists has sometimes been very negative, because of the kinds of examples we have chosen to include” (Rickford 11).

After reading both articles, I wonder if the concepts that we take to be universal vary more than we think, especially given our native dialects and if the difference between AAVE and standard English subtly changes psychological conceptions, and whether those differences impair sociological relationships.