Unique Green and Better Triangles: Diversity of Thought tied to Sociolinguistics

After reading Lupyan’s “The paradox of the universal triangle: Concepts, language, and prototypes” and Rickford’s “Unequal partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American speech community,” I was struck by both the diversity of thought connected to language and the social responsibilities tied to linguistic work. 

Lupyan’s descriptions of category membership and prototypes were fascinating; however, in particular, Lupyan’s article opened my eyes to how different the activations can be for individuals when exposed to terms such as “triangle” versus “three-sided polygons,” which should refer to the same idea. If these two terms activated the same concepts for everyone, we shouldn’t be able to identify from a group of triangles, which one is “upside-down”—yet, Lupyan’s studies show that this is indeed the case. In fact, people could identify which were “better” triangles! The results from Lupyan’s studies reminded me of something I learned when studying the philosophy of color—the idea of a unique green. There is supposedly a “unique green” that leans neither toward blue or yellow, but is its own color. However, even different people who recognize this idea will choose different shades of green as their identified “unique green,” and claim that their green is “better”! This is similar to how people will draw triangles differently depending on the language they are exposed to, and that categories with clear membership conditions can still be changeable—when people are asked to draw a “three-sided polygon,” people have different conceptions of what this should be. These ideas also draw from our previous discussions of universal definitions and why they are important—is it possible to create a universal definition for something like a “triangle”? While it seemed initially to me that this had already been done, Lupyan’s work showed that people’s conceptions may stray far from the set “universal definition” for an idea. 

While reading Rickford’s article on sociolinguistics, I was shocked by the wealth of insights that linguists have gathered from studying African American Vernacular English, and the lack of meaningful contributions in return to these communities. Although AAVE was studied in detail in the 90’s, there was huge underrepresentation from African Americans in linguistics departments—in fact, Rickford suggests that there was not a single African American faculty member in linguistic departments across the US. I deeply agree with Rickford’s proposal to not only use specialized skills to give back, like bringing more African American students into the field of linguistics, but also give back in other ways that do not even have to be tied to linguistics knowledge. Reading these two articles led me to wonder how sociolinguistics may interweave with paradoxes in defining concepts—does your social and cultural background affect the way you understand ideas like “triangle” versus “three-sided polygon”? Within a cultural community, do people have the same conceptions of what “unique green” is to them or a “better” triangle would be, and would we be able to see tangible differences in understanding across communities?