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Week 9 Language

How do people understand what they say to each other?

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Mahalia Jackson

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Qq_cVoLzs Just a closer walk with thee

• http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1qhhd_mahalia-jackson-didnt-it-rain_music

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLZcoDsPUkI The upper room

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How do people understand what they say to each other?

• The nature of language and implications for sociology. • The content of speech, the structure of language. • Labov, Bernstein, Bourdieu and Foucault on language. • In what ways is language constitutive of culture? • Is language merely a metaphor for society or something

more? • How does language differentiate people? • What is the relationship between language and theory

and methods in sociology? • This lecture will cover two aspects one - language as the

model for culture and two – language as a means of communication.

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Studies:• Reading: Bourdieu, Pierre. (1992) Language and symbolic

power.p.1-31.

To introduce the theory• Bourdieu, Pierre. (1992) Language and symbolic power.

Cambridge : Polity Press, 401.4 BOU  • Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory. Polity Press, Chap. 8

“Language and Social Life: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Relativism.”

Examples of empirical language studies• Pier Paolo Giglioli.1972 Language and social context : selected

readings Harmondsworth: Penguin. 301.21 GIG includes – W. Labov “The Logic of Non-standard English”, and B. Berstein “Social Class, Language and Socialisation”.

• Labov, W 1972 Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular Chapter 8 “Rules for ritual insults”. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 427.973 LAB 

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Kinds of ways to study language

• Phonetics – study of the sounds that constitute language. Phonemes as minimal units of language – sound contrasts which are recognised as meaningful. Limited number in all languages. Patterns of how they can be put together. – deer / tear [Voiced vs. Voiceless Alveolar

Stops ]; jeer cheer [Voiced vs. Voiceless Affricates  ]

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Kinds of ways to study language

• Grammar. Rules by which elements of language can be put together meaningfully.– Word order, definite / indefinite article, gender

• Chomsky, generative grammar. Limited number of rules which can create an infinite number of sentences. Language / grammar as built into human brain, innate ability to learn language.

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Kinds of ways to study language

• Semantics. Study of how meaning is created. Formal analysis. Semantic space. Contrasts / oppositions. Meaning is relational – hence the possibility of metaphor.– Examples of colour, kinship terms

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Kinds of ways to study language

• Socio-linguistics. Study of contrasting language communities, who uses what language in what context. – Class and regional dialects, – multi-lingualism– technical languages

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Social theory built on the model of language.

• Structuralism. Culture was structured like language, basic elements like phonemes, assembled by grammatical like rules. Structure not of institutions but of thought, ways of understanding.

• Levi-Strauss. Binary classifications at the root of all culture. In kinship, in food, in myth. Reveal the underlying structure of culture.

• Clash with Marxism over role of culture. Clash with phenomenology (social constructionism) over agency.

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Social theory built on the model of language.

• Post-structuralism. Attempt to keep insights into meaning making in culture but in case of Foucault to see this had to do with power and had a historical dimension.

• Bourdieu. Originally an anthropologist. Wrote a master piece of structural analysis “The Berber House”. His work tries to achieve a synthesis of structure and agency, and integrate cultural and institutional analysis. First came to British attention with ‘Distinction’ – the cultural language of class in France – concept of cultural capital.

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Language and Culture• So for structuralists like Levi-Strauss language is not

merely a metaphor or an analogy for culture. Language and culture are part of the same thing and share fundamental common characteristics – i.e. they are structures which are supra-individual and which generate meaning.

• For others language is a powerful model for thinking about society but not the thing itself.

• For others in importance of the study of language is that it can show us something about social diversity and social processes.

• Each puts a different emphasis on the answer to the question ‘how do we understand each other?’ – A cultural animal programmed to find meaning. – Part of a repertoire of learned behaviour.– Meanings emerge from situated contexts.

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Socio-linguistics and situated meanings

• Are some languages better than others?

• Better able to communicate complex thoughts.

• Does the language of the poor and deprived reflect / or a cause of poverty and low social status.

• Or do class dialects act to exclude others?

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Deprived speech?

• William Labov v Basil Bernstein

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Bernstein

• Working class have a “restricted code”

• Middle class have an “elaborated code”

• This enables middle class children to do well educationally and take professional jobs.

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Bernstein• “…elaborated codes orient their users towards

universalistic meanings, whereas restricted codes orient, sensitize, their users to particularistic meanings: that the linguistic-realization of the two orders are different, and so are the social relationships which realize them. Elaborated codes are less tied to a given or local structure and thus contain the potentiality of change in principles. In the case of elaborated codes the speech is freed from its evoking social structure and takes on an autonomy.”

• “restricted codes have their basis in condensed symbols whereas elaborated codes have their basis in articulated symbols. That restricted codes draw upon metaphor where elaborated codes draw upon rationality.” Bernstein in Giglioli p.164

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Berstein

• “… restricted code gives access to a vast potential of meanings, of delicacy, subtlety and diversity of cultural forms, to an unique aesthetic whose basis in condensed symbols may influence the form of the imagining. Yet, in complex industrialized societies its differently focused experience may be disvalued, and humiliated within schools or seen, at best, to be irrelevant to the educational endeavour.”

• “elaborated codes give access to alternative realities yet they carry the potential of alienation of feeling from thought, of self from other, of private belief from role obligation.” Giglioli. P.176

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Labov

• Undermines the deficit theory of educational failure which locates the problem as within the child. Particularly aspects of the ‘Head start programme’.

• “In this area, the deficit theory appears as the concept of ‘verbal deprivation’: Negro children from the ghetto area receive little verbal stimulation, are said to hear very little well-formed language, and as a result are impoverished in their means of verbal expression: they cannot speak complete sentences, do not know the names of common objects, cannot form concepts or covey logical thoughts.”

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Labov

• “Unfortunately, these notions are based upon the work of educational psychologists who know very little about language and even less about Negro children; In fact, Negro children the urban ghettos receive a great deal of verbal stimulation, hear more well-formed sentences than middle-class children, and participate fully in a highly verbal culture; they have the same basic vocabulary, passes the same capacity for conceptual leaning, and use the same logic as anyone else who learn to speak and understand English.

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Labov

• Demonstrates how defensive silences are characteristic of responses by ghetto kids to school based psychologists’ interviews, by illustrating how difficult it is even for local black adults to get a meaningful dialog in such situations.

• But goes on to demonstrate in the right context how such children exhibit massively articulate and skilled speech performances.

• He demonstrate through detailed analysis of conversation transcripts both the grammaticality and the logical structure of the language and contrast it with the verbosity and loss of the logical thread in an interview response with a middle class subject.

• That is language styles as symbolic of status not evidence of competence.

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Black linguistic styles

• Southern Baptist revivalist sermonising --http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGekpymYWZM&feature=related

• Martin Luther King - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk

• New York, sounding, rap.– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP3qL4UG1TI

• West Indies, bragging competitions, calypso - soca. – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2mPnoFC28g

• With hindsight it is amazing that it can have escaped most white observers that there is a long-standing tradition of language games within the black communities not only of American but the Caribbean as well. But such was the state of de facto segregation that it was invisible.

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UK context

• A paper at British Sociological Association Conference at University of East London showing language use in an East London comprehensive. Showed convincingly that adoption of ‘posh’ and ‘cockney’ speech codes was part of the symbolic repertoire for class identities, the remarkable thing being that less than 15% of the school was white, and had the highest proportion of refugees and asylum seeker’s children of any UK secondary school.

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Structure and agency

• Language demonstrates that there is no separation of structure and agency.

• Language is rule bound, we can specify those rules, and is also infinitely creative, as individuals we can creatively express what ever we choose.

• Indeed it is the structure which enables us to express and communicate those individual pieces of creativity.