Linguistic Exchange Research Articles

Venting as Epistemic Work

ABSTRACTWe claim that venting can be epistemic work: if one vents to the right sort of person, knowledge can be gained about an oppressive social structure, one’s place in it, and how to repair the epistemic damage it creates. To justify this claim, we define both epistemic damage and venting, and contrast venting with related notions such as complaining and ranting. Using Code’s understanding of testimony, Dotson’s notion of a linguistic exchange, and Fricker’s distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, we describe when and how venting is epistemic work. We also discuss the way venting is distinct from consciousness raising. We conclude that although one goal of venting is to repair epistemic damage for individual women, venting’s positive epistemic impact prepares women to challenge hermeneutical injustice.

Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands by Robert Lawrence Gunn

Reviewed by: Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands by Robert Lawrence Gunn Daniel Radus (bio) Key Words Languages, Borderlands, Ethnology, Native Americans, Native American languages, Ethnolinguistics Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands. By Robert Lawrence Gunn. ( New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. 304. Paper, $28.00.) In late 1846, Hector Lewis Garrard traveled west on the Taos Trail, settling for two months with the Cheyennes. "For pastime," Garrard wrote in his 1850 book Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail, "I began a glossary of the Cheyenne tongue" (62). He pointed at objects and, inquiring as to their names, recorded the responses of his hosts. When Garrard later recited their replies, his efforts were "greeted with lively sallies of laughter" (62). Garrard's hosts thought him a "mah-son-ne—'a fool'" not only for his mispronunciations, but also, as Garrard implies, for the confidence he placed in his anthropological endeavors (62). [End Page 172] Though Garrard assumed that his efforts would provide a basis for further intercultural exchange, the reaction of his hosts revealed the foolishness of those beliefs. There was, his hosts' laughter indicated, no connection—linguistic or otherwise—between Garrard's written transcription, the sounds he had made, and the language he had attempted to catalog. For the modern reader, if not for Garrard himself, the foolishness of these beliefs are reinforced further when, after this scene, Garrard recounts of the Cheyennes that "so complete and comprehensive is their mode of communication by signs that they can understand each other without a word being said" (62). In his futile attempt to record the language of his hosts, Garrard had failed to even consider—much less comprehend—the full range of their expressive practices, casting into doubt the utility of the ethnolinguistic enterprise in which he played a small, if illustrative, part. In Ethnology and Empire, Robert Lawrence Gunn explores stories like Garrard's. "Such scenarios of troubled linguistic exchange and communicative misrecognition," he writes, "echo routinely across the shifting borderlands and contact zones of American history" (3). He focuses in particular on the fluid borderlands of western North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, noting that scenarios of linguistic exchange in this period "contextualize the emergence of ethnological linguistics as both a professionalized research discipline and popular imaginative concern of American literary culture" (4). Emergent "theories of Native American languages," Gunn establishes, acted in concert with "works of fiction, travel and captivity narratives, and the political and communication networks of Native peoples" to structure "U.S. expansionist activity and federal policy" (4–5). Of particular importance to Gunn is how "the early-nineteenth-century practice of Native linguistic comparison" justified imperialist expansion by providing a scientific foundation for the "construction of racial difference," what Gunn calls an "emergent philology of race" (7). Though Ethnology and Empire is, as Gunn asserts, "rooted in the interpretive practices of literary studies," such a diverse array of sources requires a similarly diverse array of methods, among them "Native American and indigenous studies, borderlands history, performance studies, and the history of ideas" (7). Gunn, in the originality of this method, the depth of his archival and historical research, and the inventiveness of his arguments, provides in Ethnology and Empire an essential contribution to our understanding of how ethnolinguistics both served U.S. imperialism and, in its contradictions, [End Page 173] instabilities, and lacunae, offered to indigenous peoples an opportunity to resist its progression and thrall. In his first chapter, Gunn astutely historicizes the disciplinary emergence of ethnolinguistics, concluding that "linguistic questions" in this period were "inevitably, racially valenced" (44). Though some audiences will find this chapter too summative, in his synthesis of the tortuous and often opaque intellectual histories of ethnolinguistics, Gunn offers to readers an invaluable reference for later research. Scholars will have encountered the ideas and figures that populate this deft reconstruction, though likely only at the margins of their research, and without the context and clarity provided here. Most illuminating is Gunn's thorough description of how the racial valences of ethnolinguistics were "informed by the methods of comparative anatomy...

Familiarity and Unfamiliarity Factor: A Variable in the Cognition of Proverbs

Proverbs are a very common linguistic tool that provides a mechanism for understanding the general in terms of the specific. Their usage reveals the state of mind and mutual cognitive environment of the discourse participants in a linguistic exchange. The interpretation of a proverb involves a mapping process leading the hearer to search for a correspondence between the literal statement and its meaning within a context (Gibbs 1994). My paper aims at studying how familiarity and unfamiliarity factor of a proverb acts as a variable in the cognition of proverbs. It will examine how familiar proverbs are understood in a non-literal fashion more quickly than unfamiliar proverbs. For example, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ will use less processing effort than a comparatively less familiar proverb like ‘the used key is always bright’ andit will expose how ultimately greater cognitive benefits are achieved from its processing. Once the proverb is confirmed as a fixed conceptual frame, the literal and non-literal senses equally integrate into an emerging meaning structure. It will also observe how expressions of these underlying conceptual relationships in the form of verbal metaphors quickly become a part of the culture’s stock truismsand folk wisdom and how ‘conceptual integration’ and ‘frame shifting’ also depend on the familiarity and unfamiliarity of a proverb.

Tracking Colisteners’ Knowledge States During Language Comprehension

When we receive information in the presence of other people, are we sensitive to what they do or do not understand? In two event-related-potential experiments, participants read implausible sentences (e.g., “The girl had a little beak”) in contexts that rendered them plausible (e.g., “The girl dressed up as a canary for Halloween”). No semantic-processing difficulty (no N400 effect) ensued when they read the sentences while alone in the room. However, when a confederate was present who did not receive the contexts so that the critical sentences were implausible for him or her, participants exhibited processing difficulty: the social-N400 effect. This effect was obtained when participants were instructed to adopt the confederate’s perspective—and critically, even without such instructions—but not when performing a demanding comprehension task. Thus, unless mental resources are limited, comprehenders engage in modeling the minds not only of those individuals with whom they directly interact but also of those individuals who are merely present during the linguistic exchange.

Beyond frequency counts: Novel conceptual recurrence analysis metrics to index semantic coordination in team communications.

Semantic alignment is a key process underlying interpersonal and team communication. However, semantic similarity is difficult to quantify, and statistical approaches designed to measure it often rely on methods that make the identification of the relative importance of key words difficult. This study outlines how conceptual recurrence analysis (CRA) can address these issues and can be used to detect conceptual structure in interpersonal communication. We developed several novel CRA metrics to analyze communication data reported previously by Mancuso, Finomore, Rahill, Blair, and Funke (Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 58, 405-409, 2014), gathered from teams who worked cooperatively on a logic puzzle under different cognitive biasing contexts. CRA, like other measures of semantic coordination, relies on parameters whose values affect estimates of semantic alignment. We evaluated how the dimensionality of semantic spaces affects metrics quantifying the conceptual similarity of communicative exchanges, and whether metrics calculated from top-down, a priori semantic spaces or bottom-up semantic spaces empirically derived from each data set were more sensitive to biasing context. We found that the novel CRA measures were sensitive to manipulations of cognitive bias, and that higher-dimensional, bottom-up semantic spaces generally yielded more sensitivity to the experimental manipulations, though when the communication was evaluated with respect to specific key concepts, lower-dimensional, top-down spaces performed nearly as well. We conclude that CRA is sensitive to experimental manipulations in ways consistent with prior findings and that it presents a customizable framework for testing predictions about interpersonal communication patterns and other linguistic exchanges.

Taste, discourse and middle‐class identity: An ethnography of Chinese Saabists

This study adopts Bourdieu's conceptualization of taste and distinction to examine the discursive construction of Chinese middle‐class identities. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork of young urban professionals who display a shared passion for Saab cars, this article presents three examples to instantiate the ways that the participants employ linguistic and discursive resources to construct an urban middle‐class identity revolving around consumption and commodification: the first example is an interview about their taste for their Saab cars; the second is a participant observation of the Saab fans’ linguistic exchanges in which they demonstrate their ‘taste for each other’ – recognition of each other's in‐group membership and social identity; the third example is an online observation of their multimodal display of other lifestyle commodities. All three examples highlight the importance of language in creating a sense of distinction and in negotiating middle‐class identities among Chinese young urban professionals.

Language contact on the Iberian Peninsula: Romani and the autochthonous languages

AbstractThis article focuses on the history of the linguistic exchange between Romani and the autochthonous languages of the Iberian Peninsula, and on the studies in this field. Over the last 600 years, Romani has entirely disappeared, leaving marks in the evolution of mixed languages, the so-called Calós. A handful of lexemes in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan are the only remnants of a long shared history of social (and linguistic) exclusion.

Lexical contact in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: French

AbstractIn the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, French was variously involved in the dynamics of lexical contact in the Mediterranean. The study of lexical loans may display the stratification of influences and linguistic exchanges that is peculiar to the “French case”.

‘These shirts I borrow from the Finnish’: the Kanteletar and the fabric of loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’

This essay examines the personal, cultural and linguistic exchanges explored through textile metaphors in Peter Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence “A Journal” (from the collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange ). In this sequence, Sirr draws on The Kanteletar , a collection of Finnish folk verse originally published 1840-1841 by Elias Lonnrot, who also compiled the more widely known folk epic The Kalevala . Sirr’s adoption of the Finnish poems’ textile imagery allows him to interrogate the complexities of personal and cultural communication, as the sequence charts the end of a relationship between the poem’s speaker and his Finnish lover. Textiles assume multiple functions as metaphors and material objects: they act as personal and cultural references, as formal and structural devices, and as symbolic manifestations of intimate, emotional crisis. Sirr’s engagement with Finnish folk verse is thus thematic as well as formal, and articulates a desire to inhabit the lost lover’s idiom through numerous attempts of linguistic and cultural translation, and the literal and figurative processes of stitching and weaving.

New Lands, New Languages: Navigating Intersectionality in School Leadership

In the global context of deepening social and political divisions and at a time of growing forced displacement of people due to conflict, there is an ever increasing need for educators and school leaders to understand issues relating to equality and diversity with respect to themselves and the students with whom they work. In particular, the intersecting characteristics that make up individual and collective identities simultaneously afford opportunities and inflict oppressions depending on circumstances and context. This paper focuses on a theorisation of intersectionality as simultaneity through an analysis of linguistic exchanges as they reveal fluctuations of empowerment and disempowerment in the context of culturally and linguistically responsive school leadership. It draws on research findings from the English case as part of an international comparative project focused on Black women principals’ experiences of leading schools in England, South Africa and the United States of America. It reports an account of a British Pakistani Muslim woman’s experience of school leadership as she negotiated a discussion of institutional racism in a school serving a multi-ethnic population of students. Using Bourdieu’s linguistic concepts, I argue that a fine grained analysis of a series of reported linguistic exchanges with multiple stakeholders reveals how various members of the school community accepted or resisted her authority to use official language. There is no guarantee that linguistic habitus will convert into linguistic capital. Moreover, I argue that educators and school leaders need to understand intersectionality as simultaneity so they can navigate identity, institutional and social practices in relation to school leadership and the education of minoritised students.

The lexical violence of imperial culture

This article studies the history of a single word and its movement from pre-Islamic Arabia to the languages of modern Europe. It focuses on the key moment of the early nineteenth century when the Arabic ‘ghazwā’ served as the root and model of the French ‘razzia’ in the early Algerian colony. Tracing the history of the ghazwā through Islamic history and its subsequent emergence in Romance forms, the essay is comparative in the sense that it asks what happens in the movement of ideas and practices through loanwords. It suggests that the violence of modern empire was linguistic in a sense which encompasses the connections between thoughts, words and deeds, whilst critiquing literatures on lexical borrowing which tend to assume the innocence of linguistic exchange. A broader conclusion on transnational history is essayed through a consideration of the razzia in the context of the so-called ‘langue franque’: that métissage of Romance languages and Arabic which prevailed amongst traders across the Mediterranean in the early modern period, and which disappeared in the imperial Mediterranean of the nineteenth century.

On literary bullshit: discursive wrongdoing and modernity in Fray Gerundio de Campazas

ABSTRACTJosé Francisco Isla’s Fray Gerundio de Campazas is one of the first and most complete accounts of the insidious omnipresence of bullshit in modern culture. Drawing on recent debates on bullshit as well as ordinary language philosophy, this paper conceives of bullshit as both a language game and a form of life. Bullshitting alters linguistic exchanges, moral standards and social relations in decisive and unsettling ways. Relating bullshit to ignorance, self-interest, the bewitchment of language and the individual’s emancipation from authority, Fray Gerundio warns us of the dangers lurking behind bullshit by uncovering its condition of possibility, its lexicon, its grammar and its pragmatics. Isla denounces the problems that arise when words are taken out of their ordinary context. In its final chapter, Fray Gerundio playfully acknowledges itself to be an instance of bullshit, thereby hinting at a crucial dimension of this phenomenon, namely the points of overlap between fiction and bullshit. Ultimately, this paper hopes to shed new light on bullshit as well as on Fray Gerundio by treating this novel as a lesson in moral philosophy that relates to present concerns about the pervasiveness of dishonesty, concealment and deceit in personal relations as well as public discourse and institutions.

‘These shirts I borrow from the Finnish’: the Kanteletar and the fabric of loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’

This essay examines the personal, cultural and linguistic exchanges explored through textile metaphors in Peter Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence “A Journal” (from the collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange). In this sequence, Sirr draws on The Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish folk verse originally published 1840-1841 by Elias Lönnrot, who also compiled the more widely known folk epic The Kalevala. Sirr’s adoption of the Finnish poems’ textile imagery allows him to interrogate the complexities of personal and cultural communication, as the sequence charts the end of a relationship between the poem’s speaker and his Finnish lover. Textiles assume multiple functions as metaphors and material objects: they act as personal and cultural references, as formal and structural devices, and as symbolic manifestations of intimate, emotional crisis. Sirr’s engagement with Finnish folk verse is thus thematic as well as formal, and articulates a desire to inhabit the lost lover’s idiom through numerous attempts of linguistic and cultural translation, and the literal and figurative processes of stitching and weaving.

Negotiating Trade: Merchant Manuals and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean

This essay explores Italian mercantile perceptions of the non-western Mediterranean world during the late Middle Ages. In particular, it analyzes the corpus of merchant manuals known as pratiche della mercatura and argues that the intercultural and cross-confessional material included in these handbooks were vital components that helped facilitate trade across ethno-religious frontiers in the Arab-Turkic regions. This paper opens with an examination of the “traditional” manual genre, with particular emphasis on Francesco Pegolotti’s Libro di divisamenti di paesi (c. 1310-40). Pegolotti and other pratiche compilers proffered practical counsel on linguistic exchange, local folklore and customs, and resourceful intermediaries (dragomans) that could accommodate cultural assimilation for the trader abroad. The remainder of the essay builds on the fruitful historiographical shifts of recent years and identifies two additional manuals: Leonardo Frescobaldi’s Viaggio in Egitto(c. 1390) and Goro Dati’s Sfera(c. 1435). These texts, cascaded to a wide merchant audience, include striking language on the common theological underpinnings of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. These two authors, and specifically Dati, also highlight the complex character of the Italian merchant and reveal that economic self-interest helped construct common ground across major barriers of faith in the medieval Mediterranean.

Coined and counterfeit language in Renaissance England

To describe imported and new words in the rapidly changing English vernacular, Renaissance writers rely upon metaphors that emphasize similarities between linguistic exchange and features of the economy, like coining, borrowing, and counterfeiting. Concerns surrounding the stability of the early modern British economy provided analogies that could be readily applied to concerns about the legitimacy of the vernacular. Like the unstable and inflationary British economy that serves as the backdrop of early modern discussions of linguistic economies, foreign and Latinate terms were implicated in excess, uncertain value, and fraudulence committed against society at large.

What the Convention requires

Abstract How can conduct be enforced when governmental relations are entirely reliant on linguistic exchange? This is the question at stake in such jurisdictions as the United Nations when nations sign up to legally non-binding commitments. The few commentators in this area hold that non-enforceability gives states the upper hand in this relationship. The research reported here, however, challenges that conclusion. By looking at textual exchanges of reporting and assessment respectively between the New Zealand government and the Committee on the Rights of the Child over a twenty year period, this paper identifies the linguistic and rhetorical strategies by which each party attempts to orient the conduct of the other. The conclusion reached, which can still only be provisional, is that, through nothing other than unwavering reiteration of its mandate, the UN committee gradually exhausts the evasive and countering tactics of the state party to bring about a degree of compliance.

Legitimizing multilingual practices in the classroom: the role of the ‘practiced language policy’

ABSTRACTThis paper revisits the notion of ‘legitimate language’ [e.g. Bourdieu 1977. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchange.” Social Science Information 16 (6): 645–668] as it relates to multilingualism in educational contexts. Since Heller [1996. “Legitimate Language in a Multilingual School.” Linguistics and Education 8: 139–157] developed the notion of ‘legitimate language’ to encompass issues of language choice, there has been a consensus that a legitimate language is a language that is appropriate in a given situation. However, a crucial issue remains to be addressed, namely that of knowing what benchmark do classroom participants use to know when a language is appropriate, that is, legitimate or not. To address this issue, this paper takes as an example the case of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France where multiple languages have been observed. A Conversation Analysis of a set of audio-recorded interactions reveals that whilst languages other than French are not legitimised by top-down language policies and ideologies held at the societal and institutional levels, they are nevertheless seen as legitimate according to the local ‘practiced language policy’ [Bonacina-Pugh 2012. “Researching ‘Practiced Language Policies’: Insights from Conversation Analysis.” Language Policy 11 (3): 213–234]. This paper thus argues for a multi-layered understanding of legitimacy and shows how in the classroom under study, and possibly in other multilingual classrooms, practiced language policies play a key role in the legitimisation of multilingual language practices.

Prompting and Language in Metacognitive Instructional Design for Digital Science Learning: Implications for Teaching in Medical Schools

In science education at all levels, including in medical school, the use of digital technology-based learning has become ubiquitous. While digital learning tools hold much promise for science education, the question arises as to whether or not such technology can serve as an adequate surrogate for the teacher-student interactions that theorists like Lev Vygotsky (1978) underscored as being critical to learning. In response to such concerns, designers of digital curricula often utilize scaffolds to help students as they learn from such programs. Using a simulation designed to teach students about the concept of diffusion as an example, I examine the effect of including prompting language in the learning sequence of the simulation. The use of prompting language in digital curriculum appears to be successful because it elicits science students to reflect and metacognise about their learning, lending support to Vygotsky’s (1978) ideas of teaching and learning involving outer and inner dialog. However, findings from think aloud data continue to underscore the importance of human linguistic exchange as a preferable learning paradigm.

Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia's earliest farmers.

Produção de fala bilíngue: avaliando similaridade linguística, custos de troca entre línguas e sistema atencional

This article presents a study that aimed to analyze the effects of linguistic similarity and exchange costs, in task of assessment of attention network, and task of naming figure, within the paradigm of language exchange. The participants' performance, Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Spanish, was observed, based on measures of reaction time and accuracy of responses in these tasks. The results did not show significant differences in the means between the groups, but in the intrasubjective comparisons, statistically significant differences were observed when the participants had to change from L2 to L1, evidencing an asymmetric exchange cost. There were also correlations between the two tasks in the Spanish group. These results are interpreted as evidence of the effects of linguistic similarity in naming and attention tasks.