Assignment for April 3

Refining your community of practice:
Due 4/3

Consider your community of practice. How do the MACRO-SOCIAL factors of "literacy" and "gender" help to shape your community? What "communicative features" can you identify that signal gender within your community of practice (micro-social factors)?

This addendum to your last essay should be at least 3 paragraphs

Language and Gender

Language and Gender

Units of analysis:

·         Gender Exclusive Versus Gender Preferential Language Differences

o   Arawak/Carib

o   Men’s languages (secret languages) associated with patrilineal cultures (LONGHOUSE)

o   Trade jargons?

o   Where they exist, reflect gender exclusive roles

·         Sex PREFERENTIAL  Problems: Sexism in Language
---Is language sexist or is culture sexist

o   Gender INCLUSIVE language (from psychology text)

"The intent of this is to highlight a few areas where we still find exclusivity or a sense of hierarchy in the use of language to place one group of people below others, creating or perpetuating negative social stereotypes.

Given the spirit of inclusivity in our culture, some suggestions are provided here to avoid derogatory language. The examples are by no means comprehensive, but serve to remind us of areas where language discrimination still exists and causes unnecessary misunderstandings in our daily communication with the general public. The spirit of the "title" can be summed up in three general principles:

• Don't single out a person's sex, race, ethnicity, or other personal traits or characteristics (such as sexual orientation, age, or a disability) when it has no direct bearing on the topic at hand. In other words, don't create or promote stereotype based on unavoidable human characteristics.
• Be consistent in your description of members of a group: Don't single out women to describe their physical beauty, clothes or accessories or note a disabled person's use of an aid, or refer to the race of the only minority in a group unless it is at that individual's request.
• Keep in mind that use of inclusive language is for general cases. Direct requests by individuals take precedence over general rules (e.g., Mrs. John Doe requests that her own name not be used). "

• Making Distinctions: The good, the bad & the ugly
• Mailman?
• Actor/waiter/steward/mailman VS  doctor/lawyer/professor/president
• Are there gender neutral pronouns? (guys in Philadelphia)
• Designating Status & Hierarchy:
• Does Language REFLECT gender relations?
• Does Language CREATE gender distinctions?
• A bit of both?

Explanations for Differences:

• SOCIAL STATUS EXPLANATIONS: women are more status conscious than men
• WOMEN AS GUARDIANS OF SOCIAL VALUES
• Better behavior is expected of women
• Little boys are allowed more freedom than little girls in speech and other socially acceptable behavior
• SUBORDINATE GROUP MUST BE POLITE
• Looking for status recognition in larger society
• Protecting “face” (Goffman)/avoiding offence to others
• Children (less power & status) also expected to use polite forms
• VERNACULAR FORMS EXPRESS MACHISMO
• Solidarity
• Carry covert prestige for men (but not for women)
• Standard forms are associated with femininity (covert power for women)
• Rejection of “school marm” (taught) speech by female teachers
• OBSERVER’S BIAS
• Women interviewed want to make a better impression (aware of status marked setting)
• Women’s “social class” may be misidentified as her husband’s

• Signaling Gender
• Structural differences
• Pronunciation
• Grammar
• Lexicon
• Homosexual speech
• Women’s Speech: Characteristics
• General
• Conservative (more standard)
• Crossover phenomenon
• Way to advance status as lower status gender?
• Raise children-provide good language role model?
• Polite/formal
• Nonverbal communication
• Kinesics
• Proxemics
• Touching (touched more often in mixed gender & touch more)

TANNEN FILM

Distinctive aspects of MALE SPEECH

• regarded as normative language
• referential and competitive
• swearing and use of taboo words acceptable
• vernacular often preferred to more correct forms
• blunt imperatives are customary
• interrupting the speech of others is usual
• bald criticism acceptable
• questions are more frequently asked
• compliments are minimized
• apologies are minimized
• language is used as a tool of power
• topics of conversation are mainly:
• politics, economics, money, carer, job, sports, cars, women, sex

 Distinctive Aspects of FEMALE SPEECH 

• regarded as deviant language
• affective and collaborative
• hedges are common
• tag questions are common
• super polite forms are normal

These features can make female speech appear mopre tentative than male speech.

• empty adjectives are used (sweet, divine, adorable)
• intensifiers are frequent (really, so, well)
• hypercorrect grammer and pronunciation are preferred
• lack of sense of humor; less joke telling
• directy speech is used (She said to me...)
• special vocabulary (colors, etc.)
• a question intonation used in declarative statements
• topics of conversation:
• self, friends, body issues, family, domestic issues, womens problems

Gender and Non-Verbal Communication

Some differences are dependent on age and culture.

-Remember, these studies are based on tendencies and cannot predict
individual behavior.

Females:

• Claim less territory as their own. 
• Women stand closer to each other in conversation. 
• Women use more eye contact than men.
• Women use more facial expression and are generally more expressive.
• Women are more likely to return a smile when smiled at.
• Women smile more.
• Women take up less space–they hold legs more together and keep arms
  close to their bodies.
• Women stand farther away from people who speak loudly
• Women use fewer gestures than men.
• Women use more gestures when seeking approval. 
• Women tend to cross legs at the knees or cross ankles with knees slightly apart.
• Women play with hair or clothing, and place their hands in their laps.
• Women do not necessarily interpret a man's touch as a sexual invitation
• Women tend to keep hands on the arms of a chair.
• Women are approached by both sexes more closely than are men.

Males:                                                                                                                                                                                               

• Men maintain greater distance from each other. 
• Men use less eye contact. 
• Men reveal less emotion than women through facial expressions. 
• Men smile less than women. 
• Men tend to have legs apart at 10-15 degree angle and hold arms 5-10 degrees away
  from their bodies. 
• Men maintain the same distance whether people speak loudly or normally. 
• Men use more gestures than women in general social situations. 
• Men use about the same amount of gestures with men or women. 
• Men tend to sit with legs apart or with legs stretched out in front of them
  and ankles crossed. 
• Men use sweeping arm and hand gestures. 
• Men have more negative reactions to crowding. 
• Men often interpret a woman’s touch as a  sexual invitation. 
• Men rarely keep hands on the arms of chairs.

Janet Lever: gender and Children's Play

Lever, a child psychologist, noticed that children's play showed the following characteristics over time:

• Children play together until about age 5.
• At around age 5 in our culture, children "segregate" into same sex play groupings
• children who do not segregate are singled out as "tomboys" or "sissys"
• Segregated play groups have the following characteristics

                          GIRLS                                                             BOYS

                     small groups                                                    larger groups

               noncompetitive games                                     competitive games

emphasis on "sameness" in group and in play.          emphasis on hierarchy and difference in group and in play

play occurs inside in bounded space                          play occurs outside in open space

                 games are shorter                                            games are longer

        turn-taking is part of success                             competition for "floor" is part of success

•  believe that it is during this play that girls and boys learn the COMMUNICATION skills (communicative competence) that patterns their teen and adult speech patterns and behaviors.
• in effect, Matz and Borker (looking at this research) proposed that girls and boys create two different "subcultures" through play, and that men and women function in these two different subcultures without even knowing it.
• defined by linguistic and other interactional rules
• lead to miscommunication because of the varying MEANING of similar communications
• the meaning of questions
• the meaning of silence/talk
• the structure of discourse and dialogue
• turn taking rules
• the PURPOSE (function) of communication

humorous Repast

Language in Advertising: Assignment

Language in Advertising

Spring 2018

Advertisers, like the military, rely heavily on what Grice terms the “cooperative principle” when trying to persuade us to buy their goods. This means they know how people in the culture “think” and will exploit this when engaging in what seems like an “honest attempt to communicate”. In particular they exploit the fact that making implicatures (connotation), based on this principle of cooperation is a crucial part of linguistic communication within a culture. We don’t have to explicitly state everything we mean when we share cultural knowledge. Language users do not easily distinguish however, between the logical entailments (denotation) of utterance, and the implicatures (connotations) drawn from utterances. Entailments are the facts that are logically NECESSARY for the proposition to be true, implicatures are the facts that we ASSUME to be true based on the cooperative principle of communication in a shared culture. Because advertisers are legally responsible for ONLY the logical entailments of their claims, they often craft their ads so that their audience makes favorable, but false, implicatures (inferences).

How do they do this? Strategies of Deception:

1.     Leave out the than clause or prepositional phrase in the comparative construction.

(ex) “ Campbell’s Soup has one-third less salt” (than what, the Dead Sea?)

2.    Use fine print restrictions.

(ex) “Win, and go anywhere in the US that Delta flies” (Some restrictions may apply)-(woops, like to everywhere but Topeka in February).

3.    Use idiomatic language.

(ex) “Mercedes Benz, engineered like no other car in the world” (aren’t they all?) The hearer interprets this idiomatically, because the literal translation is too stupid, we suspect.

4.    Use modal auxiliary verbs to qualify strong statements.

(ex) “If you don’t go to Midas, you could be paying too much for your muffler” (and you might be paying lass as well)

(ex) “Bounce leaves your clothes virtually static free!” (but not actually static free).

Assignment:

         Now that you are on to them, see if you can describe the entailments and implicatures of the following advertising claims. What strategies of deception do they employ? Show how these strategies are culture-bound.

1.     “The other brand’s decongestant lasts only four hours per dose, and it contains aspirin, which can upset your stomach. Contac lasts up to twelve hours per dose and does not contain aspirin”.

2.    “I used to have dandruff, so I tried Head and Shoulders. Then I tried Selson Blue. Blue is better”.

3.    “STP reduced engine lifter wear up to 6.8%” (fine print at bottom of TV screen: results vary by type of car, oil, and driving).

4.    “People from Ford [county] prefer Chevy Trucks”.

5.    “Isn’t it time you got your health on the right course? Now you can cut back on cholesterol, cut back on sodium, cut back on fat and still love the food you eat because now there’s new Right Choice from Stouffer’s”.

6.    **Find and analyze one other commercial in print or on TV.

Performance, Performativity & Communities

Performance: in opposition to Chomsky's notion of "competence"

• built on deSaussure's distinction between langue and parole
• Chomsky: "competence" versus "performance"
• distinction between the abstraction of the "unconscious rules of structure" of language and how it is "imperfectly practiced" in communication
• Reactions by anthropological linguists:
• reject distinction
• reverse the importance
• redefine "competence" to include social and cultural rules for communication and transferring meaning (generative semantics)
• Dell Hymes "Communicative Competence"

Performativity: the ability of at least some utterances to DO merely by virtue of SAYING them.

• "Speech Act" theory (Austin and Searle)
• shift the focus of language away from abstract systems of structure and toward the understanding of speech as a form of social action 
• (language is a continuous act of "doing" rather than a continual state of "being")
• How To Do Things With Words:
• Conststive Utterances
• sentences that merely "say" something 
• have clear "truth values" (t/f)
• Performative Utterances
• sentences that "do" something
• use performative verbs
• I pronounce
• you are fired
• I christen you
• I apologize
• I promise
• I command
• have only "felicity conditions"(conditions that have to be met for an utterance to be a performative)
• Loctions: ALL Utterances do something
• Locution: The act of stating something (this has a locutionary force similar to a constative)
• Illocution: The doing of something instantaneously by stating something (expression of the INTENTION of the effect of the utterance-force of locution) EX:(Austin) -(Searle had a slightly different elaboration)
• verdictives-(gives a verdict)
• executives-(exercise power, rights or influence)
• commissives-(committing to doing something)
• behabitives-(involving social behavior)
• expositives-(how utterances fit into conversations-replying arguing, etc)
• Perlocution: The consequence of having stated something (effect of locution)
• language does not just express things, it also constitutes SOCIAL ACTION-language is action
• CRITIQUE: Derrida
• the meaning in language (intentionality) is always and atleast to some degree indeterminate and detached from the individuals INTENTIONS (illocution)
• meaning emerges in a particular contexts that are based on usage and familiarity and are "negotiated" within communicative contexts
• Shared Background knowledge
• Shared cultural presupposition 
• EXPANSION: Judith Butler (Gender)
• to "say" is to "do" is to "be" (identity formation)
• merged the notions of "performativity" and "performance"

Performance as Verbal Artistry: display special verbal skills for an "audience"

• genres?
• political oratories
• poetry slams
• theater performance
• storytelling sessions
• busting/running the dozens
• reading/verbal dueling
• Bauman "Verbal Art as Performance"
• performance always takes place in a social context with an audience-even if that is just one person!
• involves heightened attention to how something is said (sung, acted...) the POETIC function of language.

performance puts the act of speaking on display-objectifies it, lifts it to.a degree from its interactional setting, and opens it to scrutiny by an audience. Performance heightens awareness of the act of speaking and licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performers's accomplishment. (172)

• Keys: allow the audience to know that heightened awareness is called for-invoke performance "frames":
• special codes
• conventional openings or closings, announcements
• poetic or figurative language such as metaphor
• formal stylistic devices-rhyme, parallelisms, etc
• special patterns of tempo, stress, pitch or voice quality
• appeals to tradition
• disclaimers of performance
• vary cross-culturally and between speech communities and communities of practice
• some speech acts will conventionally involve performance
• Linguists are interested in the display of COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE (Hymes) as evaluated by the audience
• because communities are constituted primarily through linguistic interactions, studying especially memorable, heightened forms of communication such as performance will provide insights into hoe social groups are formed, challenged, reformed and maintained (Bauman).
• Emergence: all performance has an emergent quality (Bauman)
• relies on the communicative competence of individuals, and the goal of participants within the context of the performance situation. In other words the dynamics of the performance and how "educated" the audience is.
• the very structure of the performance itself can be emergent-reinforced, negotiated, or contested as the performance proceeds.(because they take place in real time)
• Individual members of the audience and the performers may interpret the the event in different ways (variable personal histories -shared background info and cultural presupposition).
• Performances are interwoven with social relations of POWER and therefore enables them to have substantial influence over the audience members-can be highly transformative or serve to strengthen social hierarchies.

ETHNOGRAPHIES:

• learning theatrical magic (Jones & Schweder)
• the compelling narratives the magician tells when performing the trick are essential to its success TALK shapes the audience's experience
• determines how the audience INTERPRETS the event
• Mexican "American" sexualized performance
• metaphorical commentary about their own oppression
• full of mock aggressions subversive function as it mirrors the abuse they suffer
• negate existing social order and affirm the possibility of a new social order
• also index patriarchy and women's exclusion from these performances
• Tij (Nepalese women's) songfests (Ahearn)
• many possible meanings, so that one must look for constraints on meaning instead of narrow interpretation of a performance. (emergence)

Maxims & Conversational Postulates: How we are "Had"

David Crystal (Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p. 378) suggests also that maxims of conversational theory do not apply to parliamentary dialogue. Other participants or commentators do not assume that speakers are telling the truth, are speaking clearly or with relevance. This may need some clarification. In some ways, debate is like social conversation - people speak in sequence, respond to each other and develop ideas. And outside of occasions when for example British MPs adopt ritual enmities (Prime Minister's Question Time or the presenting of a new draft bill, say), the speakers may follow cooperative rules and observe conversational maxims. But they have other motivations than the success of the conversation - and (in pragmatic terms) may want the exchange not to be successful, that is in coming to an accommodation.

Grice's Maxims

1. The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
2. The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
3. The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
4. The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.

Meaning is obtained through inference; it is indirect. Through inference in the context of utterance, making use of our knowledge of language and the world, our memory of past experiences, and abstract, unconscious rules of mental computation, we obtain utterance meaning in different shades: 

·      explicature (what is explicitly said)

·      implicature (what is implied logically from what is said)

·      presupposition (what underlies our beliefs in the process of inference)

·      illocutionary force (speakers intention) considering propositional attitude, all of which expressible as individual propositions. 

--meaning in communication is always subject to different interpretations in different contexts. 

Utterance meaning is never static. It is emergent, dynamic, needing to be "negotiated" between the parties involved in the communicative act. 

Grice asked...How do we make pragmatic inference? What are the principles in pragmatic inference? 

　Grice: Logic and Conversation

• The Co-operative Principle (CP)

"Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose and direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged"...PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO HONESTLY COMMUNICATE (we assume this in any conversation).

When we talk to each other, it is assumed that the above principle and maxims are being unconsciously followed by both the talking parties. This assumption makes our communication effective and reliable to a great extent. GRICE FELT THAT THIS WAS A SOCIAL CONVENTION.

• Certainly, we can either ignore the CP or flout the maxims. 
• Failing to observe the CP will lead to unwillingness to communicate, cheating, or irrational behavior. 
• Examples can be (A) A government official, when stopped by news reporters, openly refuses to answer the questions, (B) As a patient, I may decline to answer the irrelevant questions from the garrulous dentist by pointing to my fully stuffed mouth, (C) A man suffering from mental disorder may talk in an abnormal way, (D) Cheating, which does not need illustration.

Flouting the maxims of conversation ostensibly, yet still observing the CP is a more interesting case, which happens in political communication and advertising VERY often. 

• Grice: entailment (logical) versus implicature
• entailment are the logical "constative" utterances (yes/no) that are required to be true by any locution
• implicature is what is logically implied by any utterance based on our assumptions about cooperative conversations and our shared background knowledge and cultural presuppositions.
• manipulation happens by only taking responsibility for what is ENTAILED, while manipulating what is IMPLIED.

Influential power - media
(broadcast, print, new technologies)

While any text may be influenced by the maker's preconceptions and world view, many media texts arise from an explicit intention of promoting given values or attitudes, whether sincerely, because the author believes in them, or cynically, to attract an audience. As students of language, you have no interest in this - 

• your concern is the language features in which these attitudes are embodied or expressed. It may be helpful not to think of these preconceptions as "bias"-They are, rather, the speaker's or writer's outlook, assumptions or editorial stance.
• You should be aware that certain media texts proclaim and admit these underlying attitudes - opinion columns or current affairs broadcasts explicitly adopt such a stance. But others, such as reporting, may aspire to neutrality, yet display the author's value systems by choices of lexis or current metaphors. For example:

• Do we read of refugees, economic migrants or asylum seekers?
• Are they bogus, and are they passing through open (or about-to-be-open) floodgates? (How often do you meet floodgates in a literal, rather than metaphorical sense?)
• Are those who resist the state guerrillas, freedom fighters or terrorists?
• Does a writer introduce ideas of legality to confer (dis)approval, so "legal" intoxicants (alcohol, tobacco) are distinguished from those that are illegal, and so referred to as drugs.

Perhaps influential power (Facebook, etc) is less monolithic, but appears in trends and fashions. Look at the FAKE NEWS outlets as examples of this.

Lexis and semantics in the media and the process of NORMALIZATION

Normalization is the process by which meaning is shifted from a pejorative connotation to a neutral one. It utilizes a number of rhetorical devices. From the perspective of pragmatics, the two main devices are:

• Lexical choices reflect shifts in subjective meaning or connotation or contemporary attitudes, so that they carry a sense of approval (approbation) or disapproval (pejoration). They may also be euphemistic, appearing as an acceptable substitute for some word or phrase that the writer or speaker thinks too strong or direct - 
• as when the inadvertent killing of soldiers by their own allies or compatriots is "friendly fire", and the killing of civilians is "collateral damage".
• language like this is NORMALIZING

• Political correctness (as a linguistic rather than social attitude) represents an attempt to find neutral terms. While PC language is often a subject for ridicule, it arises from a sensitivity to the connotations or implications of more common forms.
• language like this is NORMALIZING

Pragmatics in the media

• We can apply the theories of pragmatics to language use in the media - but should note some special features of how they work. A simple example might be a political interview, broadcast on radio or television. What the listener or viewer might miss is an understanding of how far the speakers are aware of the wider audience, and how far the questions and answers are, or are not, spontaneous, as the interviewee may have seen them before the interview is recorded.
• coded language is often understood by only a segment of that wider audience
• Another complicating factor is the effect of editing, where an interview is recorded for later broadcast - this can remove the sense context for interpretation.

Pragmatics in politics

These include: (Obama)

·      Different types of questions, affirmative sentences, reduced and abrupt, characteristic of colloquial English, elements of the so called “broken syntax” (Rogova, 1975). They are lively, free in form, not completed, often abounding in ellipses, parceling and sometimes preferred by the orator.

o  You never gave in. You never gave up. And together we made history.

o  That’s the project the American people want us to work on. Together.

·      Metaphors. They help the audience catch the connection between what people know and the new information. They help a listener look at the familiar things the other way round. They give a possibility to interpret the new information and to come to a certain conclusion: 

o  We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service.

·      Inversion which removes the informative centre of the utterance and makes it more expressive and emotional: 

o  We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer. By the prospects of a small business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise. By the opportunities for a better life that we pass on to our children. 

·      Reiteration – one of the most preferable rhetorical figures of speech which reveals itself in repetition of identical morphemes, words, sentences, and makes the speech swift, rhythmical, expressive and emotional and in this way strengthens its influence upon the electors. For example,

o  What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow. 

o  Here we deal with syntactic parallelism, accompanied by anaphora, and antithesis. The combination of these means strengthens the impression produced on the addressee. 
What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea – the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny (anadiplosis). No workers – no workers are more productive than ours (anaphora). Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new (epiphora).

·      Alliteration – a special stylistic means aimed at creating additional musical effect produced by the utterance. The words acquire certain intonational significance and attract listeners’ attention. 

o  Because of a diplomatic effort to insist that Iran meets its obligations, the Iranian government now faces tougher sanctions, tighter sanctions than ever before.

·      Antithesis – a widespread stylistic means in speeches of political leaders, conveys contrast of ideas vividly expressed:

o  It’ not a matter of punishing their success. It’s about promoting America’s success.

·      Epithets – attributive words which make the information more exact, precise, accurate. They help a word or an utterance obtain colorfulness and influence the addressees’ vision of the political and social situation: 

o  On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

·      Metonymy – a stylistic means with the help of which the necessary word is replaced by another, analogous in meaning. It gives an addressee the possibility to see between lines (Gaines, 1999): 

o  know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

·      Hyperbole – intentional exaggeration used by politicians to emphasize ideas and to intensify expressiveness: 

o  It’s never been harder to save or retire; to buy gas or groceries; and if you put it on a card, they’ve probably raised your rates.

Personification – transference of certain qualities from animate beings to inanimate ones. It makes speech more vivid and concentrates attention on the semantic component of the utterance:

o  Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling.

Gradation – a synonymic row of words in which every next element is getting more and more or less and less intensive:

o  So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. I believe we can. And I believe we must.

Polisyndeton is used to make up a rhythmical picture of speech, underlining the significance of every element and strengthening its expressivity:

o  And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.