31.3105, Rising Stars: Meet Paola Campos!

Tue Oct 13 23:24:03 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3105. Tue Oct 13 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3105, Rising Stars: Meet Paola Campos!

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Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2020 19:23:43
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Paola Campos!

Dear Linguist List Readers,

For this week's Rising Star we are proud to present the work of Paola Campos.
She is an MA student at La Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
who is currently working on translation studies (among other things). She has
one of the most impressive resumés we have seen here at the Linguist List. For
her B.A., she graduated with honors for theoretical work on the need for a
gradual (and not categorical) consideration between lexical words and
grammatical words in Spanish. Furthermore, she published at University of
Matanzas, Cuba, a linguistic analysis of 6 translations of "Leaves of Grass"
by Walt Whitman. For this work, the Faculty of History of the Universidad
Michoacana invited her twice to teach a course on academic writing and later
the municipal presidency of Huetamo, in México, invited her to teach the same
course, for basic and higher level teachers in the region. The achievements do
not stop there however as she has given 7 lectures at national and
international academic congresses on various topics and has now joined as a
professor at the Faculty of Letters at Universidad Michoacana, in México while
working on her MA. Quite impressive. A number of other noteworthy achievements
had to be left out in the interest of brevity so let us take advantage of that
and leave you to read this great piece.

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When I think about the future of linguistics, two things come to my mind. The
first one, an unquestionable path traced by the actual technological
necessities and, the second one, a path that I believe some of us, linguists,
try to avoid sometimes given the difficulty of its study. In other words:
there is a path that I think is definitive and will develop itself –even if I
am not part of it– and another which I wish more of us could set a foot on:
social implications of language.

Over the past decades, linguistic studies have risen noticeably. Particularly,
we can see how computational linguistics have played a central role on the
development of new technologies which are related to language processing. To
give an example, we can talk about those related to automatic translation.
Given the actual situation and the problematics that have come with the raise
of the pandemic of COVID-19, I am sure that areas such as cognitive
linguistics and computational linguistics will have a major part in the
developing of new technologies that are able to respond to the current
necessities of the world. We live in a universe that becomes more dependent to
technology every day and, as social beings as we are, we are constantly being
challenged to create new ways to keep track of our communication. In this
sense, I believe, linguistic studies have an immense ocean of opportunities
ahead.

However, I also believe there are another kind of problematics to which
linguistic studies have to look: social aspects of the language. From my point
of view, we need linguists who dedicate their work to the dismantling of
prejudices and mistaken concepts of the language. For example, the belief that
some varieties of a language are better than others, or that good
pronunciation is synonymous with being a good speaker of a second language
and, in consequence, having an accent means you are not, among others. All of
them are beliefs constantly used against their speakers, they are used as a
way of discrimination and they contribute to the perpetuation of systems of
oppression which have true consequences in the life of their speakers, from
psychological aggression, to social exclusion and even making it impossible
for them to access to education or job opportunities. As specialist, we know
that all of those beliefs are false and that they are based on a wrong
conception of the language. However, there are still institutions that
perpetuate such purist ideas of the language, who incentivize some speakers to
discriminate those who do not follow the norm and, in definitive, who use
language as a form of oppression.

We have treated language as a structure for so long that we have forgotten its
implications in everyday matters. I believe that language does play an
important role in systems of oppression, whether it is used against some
speakers or it excludes some others –for example, by the use of the so-called
neutral forms or the universal masculine–. Language represents a crucial
factor in whether a person has access to education or a job or not; even more,
language has been used as an excuse by some speakers to tell others that they
have to leave a country. That is, by following some of these purist ideas,
language can be used to regulate the rights that every language speaker is
entitled to. The reconstruction of certain social structures or, to be
precise, the questioning of the established social structures reflected in
language, has brought with it some uncertainty in us, linguists. Nevertheless,
it is our duty to recognize language as more than classes of words, rules,
structures or, in a certain way, numbers.

Knowledge about the language is of no use if it is kept to those few who can
call themselves specialists. Linguistic knowledge needs to be translated to an
easier, simpler way of understanding. We need information that people can have
access to and, consequently, that can help them understand how language
actually works, as well as to understand how it can constitute one more
element, another elemental piece, of structural oppression. I believe that
there should be a future of linguistics which pursues a more inclusive and
less discriminatory use of language. This is the path that I would like to
walk on.

My name is Paola Campos, I am a Mexican linguist. My work has mostly been
centered on word classification, polyfunctionality, operational linguistics
and second language acquisition (SLA). Recently I have developed a particular
interest in the social aspects of the language. This is because, since I
started working in academic spaces, I have come to realize that mistaken
beliefs about language still constitute one of the biggest problems that
specialists like me and my colleagues have to work with, especially, because
of their real social implications. However, social media has helped me see
that this is not only a problem in my country, but rather a universal one.

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