Triangles and the importance of language

John Rickford’s article begins from a rather topical place – the exploitation of the African American community. In this case, Rickford explains the progress linguistics has made as a field through the study of different linguistic tendencies apparent amongst various minority communities, in this case the African American community. An aspect that I found rather interesting, is that this AAVE data has provided us with interesting grounds for research on narratives and speech. For example, research in areas such as tense-variation have been significantly contributed to by this study. I find this reading hugely interesting as areas such as linguistic similarities/differences are often credited with being a factor in the lack of social mobility present in the US, and lack of equal employment opportunities available to African Americans. Rickford goes on to discuss the resulting higher unemployment amongst African Americans, and the employment difficulties associated with speaking AAVE.

Lupyan discusses our inability to imagine abstraction by proving the contextual dependency we have when imagining or depicting abstract entities. He uses the ambiguity surrounding the idea of drawing a ‘normal’ triangle to prove this. Ultimately, Lupyan theorises that our bias for horizontally oriented isosceles and equilateral triangles comes from preferences for simplicity and minimisation. The most interesting observation that I found was Lupyan’s comparison of table and chair identification. Lupyan argues that we can more quickly identify tables from chairs if the tables look unchair like, rather than if they look like a standard table. Relating this to triangles, possibly our preference for ‘normal’ triangles comes from the fact that we can more easily distinguish between them and other non-triangles as this shape contrasts most obviously. Lupyan concludes by leaving us with his take on the importance of languages, claiming language can activate different representational states.