29.4811, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Pfrehm (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4811. Tue Dec 04 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4811, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Pfrehm (2018)

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Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2018 11:46:06
From: Andrew Jocuns [jocunsa at gmail.com]
Subject: Technolingualism

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-538.html

AUTHOR: James  Pfrehm
TITLE: Technolingualism
SUBTITLE: The Mind and The Machine
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Andrew Jocuns

SUMMARY

James Pfrehm’s “Technolingualism: The Mind and the Machine” coins the term
“technolingualism” to refer to the dialectic relationship between language and
technology where language influences technology and technology influences
language. The book then is divided up into six chapters, two interludes and a
conclusion. Each chapter opens with a narrative vignette which prefaces some
of the issues that the author discusses in the preceding chapter. 

Chapter 1 focuses upon one of the first forms of language technology, writing
systems. The writing revolution discusses the technological emergence of
different types of writing systems the world over. Noting differences in
alphabet and non-alphabet literacies, the author discusses how writing systems
have evolved from pictographic to ideographic systems and later to alphabets.
Later the author goes on to discuss how the properties of language itself have
influenced textualization through language’s inherent discreteness, i.e. the
make-up of individual languages sound (phonology), form (syntax), and meaning
(semantics/pragmatics), discussing how logograms represent the features that
make up a work and how a syllable is a distinct feature that can influence
writing systems. The Korean writing system is discussed as one of the best
forms of textualization because of its relationship to the articulatory
features of the language. Because Chinese is an isolating language and Korean
an agglutinative language, the Korean language was not a good fit for the
Chinese logogram system. The role of King Sejong and how he devised the Korean
writing system where the hangul alphabet is nearly a perfect match for Korean
phonology is investigated at length. Pfrehm notes how writing has influenced
language mostly through language ideologies, i.e., what linguists refer to as
prescriptivism. Writing also influences language through creating a larger
lexicon, complex syntax, pronunciation based on etymology, hypercorrective
pronunciation, internationalization, and through preservation.

The first interlude provides a discussion of how writing does not have a
negative affect language, and at the same time it does not make language
better. The notion that prescriptive ideology (i.e. bad or improper language)
precedes writing is problematized.  The author discusses how writing does not
affect grammar noting differences between shallow (minor spelling differences
and word pronunciations) versus deep variation (where there are larger
structural changes in a language). That is to say the effects of having a
writing system on language are minor compared to larger structural processes
of language change and variation.

Chapter 2 draws our attention to technological advances in literacy, which the
author refers to as mechanization. The discussion focuses upon the printing
press and the typewriter. Staring with the printing press, and how language
influenced the emergence of print technologies, the author draws our attention
to the mechanization of language. The fact that in the Chinese logographic
system one character equals one word inherently influences the print
technology, or as Pfrehm notes, the mechanization of the language. Hence it
was more intuitive for Chinese inventors to develop writing technologies from
a word not sound centered perspective. One of the early Chinese writing
technologies was a cumbersome system made from carved wood blocks. The focus
then shifts to the manuscript age which emerged after the development of the
Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century. The effect that the
printing press had on language had to do with standardization which initially
emerged through orthographic and typographic conventions. Standardization
through writing systems eventually led to language ideologies that were more
prescriptive in nature. Pfrehm argues that through engaging the written word
speakers develop more metalinguistic awareness. Speaker’s engaged others
through writing and developed personal relationships through literacy.
Moreover this new technology led quickly to issues of ownership;where
previously texts were copied word for word, now the notion of the ownership of
a text became important. This led to the first copyright laws not long after
the printing press emerged. Considering how long the written word had existed
before the printing press, the shift from the printing press to the notion of
copyright was quite quick by comparison. The second part of the chapter
discusses the evolution of the typewriter as a form of mechanization. There
were numerous attempts at making a typing machine but it was not until someone
thought of examining the most commonly used clusters of letters that the
technology was able to take off. One of the ways that the typewriter impacted
language was known as the typewriter effect, where some authors were
influenced by the sound of the machine and as a result they made longer
sentences. The chapter on mechanization concludes with a discussion on some
ideological manifestations of the typewriter. For example it led to the use of
dictation as well as notions of who should use the typewriter. It was a sign
of prestige that the owner of the typewriter would not necessarily be the one
who used it.

Chapter 3 abstraction is the analytical focus of Chapter 3 and refers to how
it is that two technologies, the telegraph and the telephone both led to
distancing between speakers and their respective languages. Such abstraction
occurred in time, location and physicality. The technological innovations that
led to the telegraph led to unique changes (or abstractions) in language
specifically with regards to the phenomenon known as Morse speak and Morse
jargon. These ways of speaking emerged in part because the telegraph companies
charged by word. News agencies which sent telegraph messages several times a
day would thus be able to save money from utilizing a reduced form of Morse
code. A prolonged discussion on the development and design of the telephone
follows but the heart of the chapter is how language was affected by the
telephone, for example how does one open a telephone conversation?  Pfrehm
notes that the opener shifted from “Ahoy!” to “what is wanted?” to the now
ubiquitous “hello”, which to that point had been a part of colloquial speech
before entering the lexicon as a preferred greeting. With the telephone there
were a number of language ideologies that emerged most notably with the
emergence of guidelines and books on how to properly use the telephone. The
discussion of the telephone ends with an analysis of three such books and the
language ideologies that they entail.

In Chapter 4 digitization, we learn how the computer affected language and
vice versa. To begin we learn how language affected computer code, moving
language from text to 1s and 0s with the emergence of ASCII. A good portion of
the chapter focuses upon the constraints placed upon language by ASCII in much
the same way that choices made in written codes constrained language as well
as their mechanical manifestations. This is followed by a discussion of the
role of the Chomskyan paradigm in the developing field of software engineering
in the 1950s and 1960s. The second half of the chapter shifts our attention to
computer mediated communication (CMC) and its effects on language, beginning
with how email communication ultimately became a different paradigm because of
the issue of time. In addition there appears to be some belief that email
communication is ephemeral, in part because of its rapid pace of
communication. Pfrehm notes how the technological innovation of email led to
new linguistic practices, for example intercalation — where one inserts a
series of replies and responses in between one another. This is followed by a
brief discussion of CMC effects on other languages, prescriptivist guides to
CMC communication and the language ideologies embedded within them. The
chapter closes by focusing upon the emergence of corpora for CMC alongside a
brief case study on wordnik, a digital technology that seeks to compile
forgotten, missing, or overlooked English words.

The second interlude compares and contrasts linguists’ and non-linguists’
stances toward the effects of CMC on language, noting that there does not seem
to be a uniform stance towards CMC from linguistics. This in part may be due
to the fact that computer mediated communication is constantly changing. The
non-linguists’ take is largely prescriptivist in nature.

Chapter 5 is on mobilization with a discussion of cellphones and text
messaging. The author first discusses the role that the spectrogram played in
the development of cell phone technology. Noting that speech-recognition
technology was largely influenced by research originally conducted in 1947
with the publication of Visible Speech, we learn how acoustic modeling
eventually led to the wave form. One of the problems in speech modelling had
to do with the fact of speech variation. How could so much variation be
identified by the new technology? The answer derived from Bell Labs’
development of speech clustering algorithms. The latter part of the chapter
discusses how the cellphone affected language through the development of
textspeak. Here we learn that rebus (where a linguistic item is represented
with a non-linguistic one or icon) which was mentioned in Chapter 1 on the
development of written codes like cuneiform, is present within textspeak. This
is followed by a discussion of some of the features of textspeak, as well as
the fact that as the technology changed from dumb to smart phones, textspeak
has changed in part because of the auto-correct feature and its many
frustrations. The chapter concludes with Pfrehm analyzing some of the
prescriptivist ideologies that have emerged along with textspeak. 

Chapter 6 introduces regeneration and elaborates on the technological advances
that have led to the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant and its ability to
enable the deaf to hear is the main focus. Here we learn how the discovery of
the mechanics and anatomical function of the cochlea in the inner ear led to
the acoustic spectrum analyzer. We then learn of the cochlear implant and its
effects on the deaf community as well as its effects upon a linguistic code,
American Sign Language, not to mention its effects upon language identity and
language ideologies within the deaf community. Pfrehm then draws our attention
to sign languages as real linguistic codes and the ideologies and identities
of the deaf community. A big takeaway from this chapter was the fact that a
technology can transform a person’s biology such that they move from a social
category of deaf person to hearing person, and that this technology can have a
negative impact in terms of identity.. 

The conclusion offers us five takeaways from the discussion of how language
affects technology and how technology affects language. These takeaways
include: linguistic knowledge has the ability to positively affect
technologies;prescriptivist assumptions and folk linguistics tend to follow
language technologies; alphabets can influence language and technology;
language ideologies are constantly emerging with new ideologies; and lastly
language and technology affect one another, which as the author mentions
throughout the book is the definition of the term “technolingualism”.

EVALUATION

While the book does a good job at identifying trends in relationships between
language and technology historically there are a few things that the book
could have done to make a stronger analytical argument. There have been some
notable analyses of how technology has changed human behavior as well as some
work that has examined how language has changed due to that. To that end it
seems a stronger analytical point could have been made by examining the
affordances and constraints that emerge from technological advances. Some good
examples are from James Wertsch’s (1998) “Mind as Action” where he lays out
the history of technological advances in the javelin toss and the affordances
and constraints of advancing from wood javelin to synthetic materials. A more
language and discourse analytic approach to language and technology can be
gleaned from Jones & Hafner's, (2012) “Understanding Digital Literacies” where
as an example of how to analyze affordances and constraints, the authors lay
out the technological and historical changes that led to development of the
wristwatch. The changes are linguistically real; moreover, having the
wristwatch has changed how we think about time linguistically. In short. some
discussion of the affordances and constraints that have come along with
technology and its relationship to language would have made a stronger
analytical argument. Some of these things were mentioned in the book but not
explained in detail. For example the author’s discussion of the effects of the
printing press on language and language ideology. The affordance being that
the printing press revolutionized how quickly texts could be disseminated but
a notable constraint was in authorship. The issue of authorship eventually led
to emergence of copyright law which certainly affects the quality of the
written word to this very day; this can also be related to the author’s
discussion of digitization if we consider fan fiction and how many authors are
threatened by their work being re-tooled by fans.

The book is written in a very conversational and accessible style and fits
within the scope of much of the literature on the history of literacy. A good
audience for this book would be undergraduates or non-linguists who are
unfamiliar with technology and its relationship to language. I could see using
a few of the chapters in a course I teach on language and communication and I
believe its contents would be suitable for an introductory course in literacy,
a course in digital literacy, and also courses in science, technology and
society.

REFERENCES

Jones, R. H., & Hafner, C. A. (2012). Understanding Digital Literacies: A
Practical Introduction. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge.

Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind As Action. New York: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Jocuns is a sociolinguist who has conducted research on discourse and
learning in the United States and Southeast Asia with a particular focus on
Indonesia. He is presently conducting research on linguistic landscapes,
narrative, intercultural communication and Thai English. His research has
appeared in such journals as Semiotica, Mind Culture Activity, Journal of
Engineering Education, and Journal of Multicultural Discourses.





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