Socially Conscious Linguistics?

Prior to this week’s readings, I’d spent little time considering the potential consequences of linguistic study. The Rickford reading made me think about how academia has the capacity to both treat communities as objects for study and professional advancement while simultaneously dismissing those communities as multi-dimensional, affect-able groups. Though linguists’ work — like the extensive studies about AAVE — can change how a community is perceived and reinforce certain stereotypes about a population due to both uneven sampling and disproportionate representations, there is historically little effort to diminish or correct negative consequences of linguistic work. Rickford addresses this reality with his suggestion that, if the ultimate objective of social science is to better the world, there are ways in which sociolinguists can give back to the communities from which they collect so much data. However, his implication that teaching African American communities to speak differently instead of changing the perception of AAVR is disconcerting. Language informs culture, and changing language — or claiming that language is somehow “wrong” — has deep cultural repercussions. This article also make me think about what it means to speak “normally,” and the way in which growing up speaking urban California English (the kind of English mostly spoken on TV and in movies) has impacted others’ perception of me and my perception of others.

The second article was more challenging for me, though equally thought-provoking. The author’s discovery that people react different to instructions to “draw a three-sided polygon” vs. instruction to “draw a triangle” suggests that mental representations are both context-dependent and specific. It seems reasonable to imagine that universal mental representations and grouping of literal things aid cross-linguistic communication, but I wonder how this notion translates to something that doesn’t have as explicit a definition as a triangle. In other words, there are things that are triangles and things that are not, but how do we communicate and mentally represent abstract concepts like emotions and norms?