17.2042, Disc: Cultural Identity & Lang; Word Stress; Cartesian Linguistics

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-2042. Wed Jul 12 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.2042, Disc: Cultural Identity & Lang; Word Stress; Cartesian Linguistics

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1)
Date: 11-Jul-2006
From: Stan Anonby < stan-sandy_anonby at sil.org >
Subject: Cultural Identity and Language 

2)
Date: 11-Jul-2006
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay < anekanta at rediffmail.com >
Subject: Word Stress-Existence at Stake? 

3)
Date: 11-Jul-2006
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay < anekanta at rediffmail.com >
Subject: Cartesian Linguistics: From Cogito to Psyche 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:58:32
From: Stan Anonby < stan-sandy_anonby at sil.org >
Subject: Cultural Identity and Language 
 

I've been following the scuttlebut about English only and the translation
of the "Star Spangled Banner". I'm here in the States teaching in a summer
session in North Dakota, and the subject of identity and language has come up. 

I'd like to throw out an observation made by a student from California. Her
comment was that the Hispanics in Fresno are divided into three groups:
 
The first group is formed by people directly from Mexico. They speak
English poorly, but "are the most American". She said you can tell who they
are because they all have American flags hanging from their windows. 
 
The second group is formed by their children. They're just living life, are
bilingual, and don't think or talk about who they are much.
 
The third group is the third generation. These people don't speak Spanish,
only English. However, they're the ones who are most vocal about language
rights and being Mexican. They are the ones who hang Mexican flags in their
windows, and say, "Viva la raza!" 

Another student commented on a similar situation in southern Manitoba. She
said her grandmother's generation lives the Mennonite lifestyle, speaks
Plautdeutch, but seldom talk about their identity.

She said people in their 20's were much more proud and vocal about being
Mennonite. Yet they do not speak Plautdeutch.  
 
I myself am not American or Mennonite, so I can't vouch for any of this.
 
It does ring more or less true to me, though. I've seen similar phenomena
among Indigenous peoples in Brazil and Canada. 
 
I'm not sure if this tendency is the norm, the exception, or even accurate.
Any comments?
 
Stan Anonby 


Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics



	
-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:58:36
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay < anekanta at rediffmail.com >
Subject: Word Stress-Existence at Stake? 

	

Traditionally, in Phonetics as well as in Linguistics, stress of words is
to be attested before going to analyze sentential intonation.  What is
"word" really, especially in this type of pre-lexical studies? Is it not
mere truism that the "word" is a culture-specific concept, which has only
visual representation?  There is no such representation in the game of
speaking.  A literate speaking subject, in his/her printing culture, has
only a visual sensation of word.  If word is to be defined as a something
(visual black or any other colored figure) in between two (white or any
other colors) spaces (grounds), the boundaries of word depend on the
particular literate community's way of manipulating blank (or, one may call
it as "other" spaces) spaces in their printing/writing.  The
boundaries/spaces as defined by traditional morphology, do not exist when a
speaking subject is engaged in a discourse. At that moment of speaking,
from the subject's position, it is not word-stress, but it is rather a
harmonic intonation of a discourse, which s/he is expressing as a continuum
without ontologically being conscious about the grammarians' order of
things (different levels of language, viz. phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase,
sentence). As word does not exist, the word-stress is also an absentee at
the moment of speaking. The memory of these blank spaces may also influence
the way of speaking of a literate speaker.  It is meaningless to account
stress by isolating a 'word' (which is actually a citation form as it is
lemmatized in the dictionary produced by the print capitalism) from the
speech continuum. Thus, the typological differences (as designated in the
order Polysynthetic, Synthetic, Agglutinating and Analytic languages) of
languages on the basis of word-morpheme ratio hold no water at all if we do
not consider the literate culture-specificity of something called word. 

What do you think about this problem?  How do you consider tonal languages,
if the above statement is to be considered as "true"? 


Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Morphology
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology


 

	
-------------------------Message 3 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:58:42
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay < anekanta at rediffmail.com >
Subject: Cartesian Linguistics: From Cogito to Psyche 

	

1.  From where does the ideal speaking subject speak?  Where is the locus of
ideal speaking subject?  What is about the history (childhood configuration,
neurotic elements) of such ideal speaking subject?  Does the outside influence 
information of inside (a physical organ, LAD)?  What happens to
transcendental Cogito (as postulated in Cartesian Linguistics) or the
competence of creating infinite sets of sentences, when it is subjected to
the outside sociality (threat, violence etc.)?  (Here I am inkling towards
Psychoanalysis-to the construct of "psyche" rather than that of cogito as I
am emphasizing on the society-psyche interface). 

2.  Chomsky, out of his Cartesian anxiety, considers body as a machine.   He
deploys technical metaphors ((e.g., The terms like "Computation", 'array"
"interface", "parser" etc., or operations like "COMMAND", "SATISFY", "SPELL
OUT") for explaining human body.   These are not metaphors or case of
displacement only, but a case of metonymic transformation of human body as
these technical metaphors condense the scope of human (linguistic)
potentiality.  Does human body follow algorithm only at the moment of
speaking?  Do we not have extra-/non-algorithmic cognitive ability?  (My
point is that Cognitive Domain is not algorithmic only.)

3.  Chomskian syntax analyzes the algorithm of "normal" "well-formed"
sentences only.   Apart from the exclusion of institution-body corre(a)lation
in the Chomskian hypothesis, this very construction of "natural language"
(e.g., the well-constructed written sentences) mercilessly marginalizes the
language of so-called non-"natural" madness or folly.  How do we know the
differences between normal way of speaking and abnormal  way of speaking? 
This question was initiated by Foucault (1968) to beg the premise of
Cartesian cogito.  Chomsky, who is like an old-fashioned physicist, is
interested only in VIBGYOR.  However, in the domain of Art (where infinite
sets of colors are illuminating) and literature, there is a proliferation
of "deviations" from so-called "normal standard" (as constructed by the
Ideological State Apparatuses) and without such "deviations" no work of art
or literature or any paradigm shift  is possible.  Is this domain of Art and
Literature, a domain of unreason or madness or is it un-"scientific"? 


Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Language Acquisition
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Psycholinguistics


 



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