Triangles and AAVE

The Lupyan article focused on the topic of the abstract idea of the word ‘triangle.’ It highlighted the fact that although we all think of a specific shape when we hear the word ‘triangle,’ we don’t all think of the same shape. There is variability across drawings representing this idea. Interestingly, however, there is a prototypical triangle triangle, which is an equilateral triangle. I found it funny that one of the descriptions of this particular type of triangle was the phrase “‘sexy little equilateral triangles are the trianglest.’” Clearly whoever wrote this response has a good idea of what they believe is a true representation of a triangle. 

Lupyan also interestingly observed that there was a noticeable difference between figures drawn by participants who were asked to draw a ‘figure with three sides’ or a ‘three-sided polygon’ as opposed to a ‘triangle.’ This is where language has a huge effect on how people think: people given the prompt excluding the actual word ‘triangle’ drew less typical triangles than those told specifically to draw a ‘triangle.’ Personally, looking at Figure 3 in the article with samples of the drawings from the two different prompts, I can’t see a noticeable difference between the two prompts. All the drawings are of triangles, however apparently there are more ‘equilateral’ triangles drawn in response to the prompt ‘Draw a triangle’ than in response to the other prompt. Either way, it is clear from this article that language plays a powerful role in our conceptions of ideas and representations of words in our minds. 

In the second article, Rickford discusses the relationship between sociolinguistics and the African American speech community, discussing in particular African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I found the divide between what the African American speech community has contributed to sociolinguistics and what sociolinguistics has reciprocated to be interesting: Rickford highlights the fact that countless advances in academia since the 1960s have been the result of AAVE data, yet sociolinguistics has done little to give back to this community from which they are taking so much. Most surprisingly, in the early 1990s, only a few years before this article was written, “not a single US-born African American faculty member was employed in a Department of Linguistics anywhere in the US.” This is the result of a lack of support of the African American speech community by sociolinguistics in general - Rickford pushes for more representation in this area.