Language, Power and Pragmatics

I feel like this is what we need to write about for a final essay for this class. Let's look at the power of Language and the ways that politicians use and direct speech and our attitudes toward speech in order to exert their power and authority. :)

What is it all about?

One obvious feature of how language operates in social interactions is its relationship with power, both influential and instrumental. Neither rule nor law, neither discipline nor hierarchy sanctions influential power (informal) .

• Authority (power backed up by force or threat of force)
• Legitimacy (power backed up by consensus)
• informal (expressed through influence)
• formal (expressed in institutions)

It inclines us or makes us want to behave in certain ways or adopt opinions or attitudes, without obvious force. It operates in such social phenomena as advertising, culture and the media. (Strictly, we are not coerced into buying what the advertiser shows us, nor will we suffer any penalty for our "sales resistance".)

Instrumental power (Formal) is explicit power of the sort imposed by the state, by its laws and conventions or by the organizations for which we work. It operates in business, education and various kinds of management. (In many, but not all cases, if we resist instrumental power, we will be subject to some penalty or in trouble.)

Politicians & power: 

• impose laws, taxes, and bureaucratic systems (instrumental power) but seek to influence us to endorse their policies or turn out to vote for them (influential power). They may wish to influence us to use our collective power to return them to office, where they will use their executive power to direct some aspects of our lives - a curious paradox of our system of parliamentary democratic representation. 
• (That is they get us to give them the power to tell us what to do and how to live. And we really do have the choice, collectively, as we show when we vote for a change of government.)

Effective rhetoric is about the right words, at the right time and in the right place.

• Language is a powerful tool; it can be used as a means of controlling or shaping the thoughts of others. 
• Tongtao Zheng of the University of Tasmania writes: “Language is a weapon and a powerful tool in winning public support, especially during the current information revolution period...it is also a powerful weapon in the struggle of community against community, worldview against worldview.” (we certainly saw this in this election)

Propaganda/Rhetoric: The Power to "define":

• Dr Andrew Cline writes: “The power to define, and make it stick, is arguably the premier political power. To control the definitions of terms is to control the debate by bracketing how the audience may think about an issue. To create new terms is to create new realities.” 
• "propaganda": He demonstrates the power of creating new terminology with an example from April 12, 2002, when White House press secretary Ari Fleischer introduced the term ‘homicide bombers’ for the Palestinian men and women blowing themselves up in public places. He points out that this change in terms is not politically innocent: any terms created or redefined by a political administration have political importance:
• In this case, the new term helps further delegitimize the bombers. What's wrong with that? Perhaps nothing, except that the term may also further delegitimize the larger cause of the Palestinian people, which is the establishment of an independent state. In other words, this new term might further aggravate the idea of guilt by proximity, as if all Palestinians think and act alike in regard to the violence.Suicide bombers might be fighting for legitimate political ends (establishment of a state) by decidedly illegitimate means (the murder of civilians or non-combatants). A "homicide bomber" is simply a criminal who wishes to kill outside of political goals. While it is possible under some circumstances to condone the violence of a “freedom fighter,” this new term adds further distance between any legitimate concept or action and the actions of the homicide bombers. The new term helps the Bush administration put further pressure on the Palestinian authorities to do more than simply denounce violence; it puts pressure on them to actively stop the lawless action of criminals who have no legitimate political claims. (“'Homicide Bombers' Further Delegitimizes Violence," Rhetorica Network, April 14, 2002) :(
• Peter Beinart writes:…the extraordinary thing about American foreign policy since September 11 is the extent to which it has been shaped by language. In the terrible days after the World Trade Center fell, the Bush administration grasped for words that would capture America's resolve. And it came up with “war on terrorism.”… “Terrorism” meant violence by individuals or groups (but not governments) against civilians, no matter what the cause. 
• “War” didn't connote a merely military effort, but it suggested a broad struggle with the urgency, and Manichaean clarity, of a battlefield campaign.
• The phrase soon caught on overseas, and other governments began to use it in order to invest their own conflicts with the same moral authority. Russian called its struggle in Chechnya a “war on terrorism,” as did India with Kashmir, Israel with Palestine, and many others. Beinart points out that partly due to their use of this phrase, US policy swung towards support of the government forces: Russian, India and Israel. However, there are significant differences between the conflicts in these countries and the US fight against Al-Queda. He explains:The critical difference is that the wars in Kashmir, Palestine, and Chechnya are wars of national liberation. The terrorists seek to end a foreign occupation and create an independent state on a defined piece of land. That doesn't make their demands legitimate: Yasir Arafat's definition of a Palestinian state is clearly grandiose and dangerous (especially given that Israel is so small--and therefore particularly imperiled by such fantasies); Kashmir and Chechnya probably shouldn't be independent states at all. And it doesn't make their methods legitimate either: There's no excuse for deliberately targeting civilians. But as a practical matter, wars of national liberation are easier (though certainly not easy) to resolve politically and much harder to resolve militarily than the kind we're fighting against Al Qaeda. (“Word Play,” The New Republic, April 12, 2002) :(
• In a February 24, 2002 article in the New York Times, Mark Lilla, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, describes the negative European reaction to Bush’s phrase “axis of evil” to describe adversary states. He compares Bush’s rhetorical style to that of Ronald Reagan during the cold war era. But while Reagan’s style may have been appropriate at the time, the current situation is quite different:
• When Ronald Reagan addressed the Soviet leadership, he was dealing with functionaries of a highly routinized, if sclerotic, empire, a state where the passions of religion and nationalism played almost no role. The American rivalry with the Soviet Union was likened to a chess game where each party understood the moves and feints of the other. Today, however, the United States is facing adversaries that are wholly unlike our cold war rivals. They are not part of an empire or even an axis; they are regimes as different from each other as we are from them, and there is no shared understanding of the rules of the game. Some are driven by a messianic ideology to seek not temporary advantage or influence, but an impossible transformation of worldly existence. Others are classic tyrannies run by ruthless figures whose moves are wholly unpredictable. And there are states where no one seems in control. Lilla points out that choosing the right rhetorical style can affect the course of events, suggesting as an example, that Bush's “masterly way of reaching out to Muslims at home and abroad has displayed before the world our principles of tolerance.” (“New Rules of Political Rhetoric,” New York Times, February 24, 2002) :(

Euphemisms

• In 1946, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell criticised current use of the English language, particularly in politics. He pointed out the general emptiness of political rhetoric and discussed the increasing use of euphemisms to avoid admissions of possibly controversial actions:
• In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing… Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy… 
• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 
• Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. :(

Influential power - politics

The features of political language vary, as do its purposes.

• Where politicians interact with society generally, their purposes may be, to persuade voters with a party loyalty to turn out to vote; to move a  floating voter's party allegiance, or to make us adopt general political or social attitudes, so we support a given policy. 
• Politicians may also use particular language forms when answering journalists' questions.
• Where politicians engage in language interactions with other politicians, they may use other particular forms - either loosely or under the rule of an arbiter. 
• And finally, a contemporary feature of political language use is what is known as "spin" - providing information to the media in such a way as to favor a desired interpretation, not explicitly stated.

Political rhetoric

Persuasive language techniques, especially in speech, take their name from the Greek noun for a professional speaker, rhetor (the Latin equivalent is orator). We have ancient records of political speeches, such as those of Demosthenes, that show the use of techniques that are as effective today, as they were in the past. Max Atkinson, of Oxford University, suggests that political speechwriters consistently rely on a range of powerful techniques:

• alliteration,
• allusion,
• antithesis (inversion),
• asking questions and suggesting answers,
• lists (especially of three items),
• metaphor (especially extended metaphor),
• parallelism,
• parenthesis,
• repetition and
• redundant questioning.

for example....

In John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address from January 20, 1961, we find an extended metaphor (of lighting a fire to give light to the world) and a concluding antithesis:

"The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not, what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

The last two sentences use many of the same lexemes, but transpose (switch) the subject and the indirect object.

Now look at these longer extracts (from which some of the examples above come), and see if you can find other ways in which the writer (not the same person as the speaker, usually) uses specific techniques to achieve particular effects.

"In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not, what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

John F. Kennedy

"And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance, of expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future and we'll continue to follow them. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God."

Ronald Reagan

Thinking about examples from this election and more recent manipulations by politicians...

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.

SPEECH CLINTON

SPEECH-TRUMP

The results

PEW STATS

nonverbal communication

What is non-verbal communication?

Definition (CBC): “nonverbal communication involves those nonverbal stimuli in a communication setting that are generated by both the source [speaker] and his or her use of the environment and that have potential message value for the source or receiver [listener]  (Samovar et al).   Basically it is sending and receiving messages in a variety of ways without the use of verbal codes (words).  It is both intentional and unintentional.  Most speakers / listeners are not conscious of this.   It includes — but is not limited to:
• touch
• glance
• eye contact (gaze)
• volume
• vocal nuance
• proximity
• gestures
• facial expression ? pause (silence)
• intonation
• dress
• posture
• smell
• word choice and syntax
• sounds (paralanguage)

Broadly speaking, there are two basic categories of non-verbal language:
        nonverbal messages produced by the body;
        nonverbal messages produced by the broad setting (time, space, silence)

Why is non-verbal communication important?

Basically, it is one of the key aspects of communication (and especially important in a high-context culture).  It has multiple functions:
 
• Used to repeat the verbal message (e.g. point in a direction while stating directions.
• Often used to accent a verbal message. (e.g. verbal tone indicates the actual meaning of the specific words).
• Often complement the verbal message but also may contradict.  E.g.: a nod reinforces a positive message (among Americans); a “wink” may contradict a stated positive message.
• Regulate interactions (non-verbal cues covey when the other person should speak or not speak).
• May substitute for the verbal message (especially if it is blocked by noise, interruption, etc) — i.e. gestures (finger to lips to indicate need for quiet), facial expressions (i.e. a nod instead of a yes).

Note the implications of the proverb: “Actions speak louder than words.”  In essence, this underscores the importance of non-verbal communication.  Non-verbal communication is especially significant in intercultural situations. Probably non-verbal differences account for typical difficulties in communicating.

Cultural Differences in Non-verbal Communication

1. General Appearance and Dress
All cultures are concerned for how they look and make judgements based on looks and dress.  Americans, for instance, appear almost obsessed with dress and personal attractiveness.  Consider differing cultural standards on what is attractive in dress and on what constitutes modesty. Note ways dress is used as a sign of status?

2. Body Movement
We send information on attitude toward person (facing or leaning towards another), emotional statue (tapping fingers, jiggling coins), and desire to control the environment (moving towards or away from a person).
More than 700,000 possible motions we can make — so impossible to categorize them all!  But just need to be aware the body movement and position is a key ingredient in sending messages.


3. Posture
Consider the following actions and note cultural differences:

• Bowing (not done, criticized, or affected in US; shows rank in Japan)
• Slouching (rude in most Northern European areas)
• Hands in pocket (disrespectful in Turkey)
• Sitting with legs crossed (offensive in Ghana, Turkey)
• Showing soles of feet. (Offensive in Thailand, Saudi Arabia)
• Even in US, there is a gender difference on acceptable posture?

 
4. Gestures
Impossible to catalog them all.  But need to recognize: 1) incredible possibility and variety and 2) that an acceptable in one’s own culture may be offensive in another.  In addition, amount of gesturing varies from culture to culture.  Some cultures are animated; other restrained.  Restrained cultures often feel animated cultures lack manners and overall restraint.  Animated cultures often feel restrained cultures lack emotion or interest.
Even simple things like using hands to point and count differ.
Pointing : US with index finger; Germany with little finger; Japanese with entire hand (in fact most Asians consider pointing with index finger to be rude)
Counting:  Thumb = 1 in Germany, 5 in Japan, middle finger for 1 in Indonesia.


5. Facial Expressions
While some say that facial expressions are identical, meaning attached to them differs.  Majority opinion is that these do have similar meanings world-wide with respect to smiling, crying, or showing anger, sorrow, or disgust.  However, the intensity varies from culture to culture.  Note the following:

• Many Asian cultures suppress facial expression as much as possible.
• Many Mediterranean (Latino / Arabic) cultures exaggerate grief or sadness while most American men hide grief or sorrow.
• Some see “animated” expressions as a sign of a lack of control.
• Too much smiling is viewed in as a sign of shallowness.
• Women smile more than men.

 
6. Eye Contact and Gaze
In USA, eye contact indicates: degree of attention or interest, influences attitude change or persuasion, regulates interaction, communicates emotion, defines power and status, and has a central role in managing impressions of others.

• Western cultures — see direct eye to eye contact as positive (advise children to look a person in the eyes).  But within USA, African-Americans use more eye contact when talking and less when listening with reverse true for Anglo Americans.  This is a possible cause for some sense of unease between races in US.  A prolonged gaze is often seen as a sign of sexual interest.
• Arabic cultures make prolonged eye-contact. — believe it shows interest and helps them understand truthfulness of the other person.  (A person who doesn’t reciprocate is seen as untrustworthy)
• Japan, Africa, Latin American, Caribbean — avoid eye contact to show respect.

 
7. Touch
Question: Why do we touch, where do we touch, and what meanings do we assign when someone else touches us?


Illustration: An African-American male goes into a convenience store recently taken over by new Korean immigrants.  He gives a $20 bill for his purchase to Mrs Cho who is cashier and waits for his change.  He is upset when his change is put down on the counter in front of him.What is the problem?  Traditional Korean (and many other Asian countries) don’t touch strangers., especially between members of the opposite sex.   But the African-American sees this as another example of discrimination (not touching him because he is black).
Basic answer:  Touch is culturally determined!  But each culture has a clear concept of what parts of the body one may not touch.  Basic message of touch is to affect or control  — protect, support, disapprove (i.e. hug, kiss, hit, kick). 

• USA — handshake is common (even for strangers), hugs, kisses for those of opposite gender or of family (usually) on an increasingly  more intimate basis. Note differences between African-Americans and Anglos in USA.  Most African Americans touch on greeting but are annoyed if touched on the head (good boy, good girl overtones).
• Islamic and Hindu:  typically don’t touch with the left hand.  To do so is a social insult.  Left hand is for toilet functions.  Mannerly in India to break your bread only with your right hand (sometimes difficult for non-Indians)
•  Islamic cultures generally don’t approve of any touching between genders (even hand shakes).  But consider such touching (including hand holding, hugs) between same-sex to be appropriate.
• Many Asians don’t touch the head (Head houses the soul and a touch puts it in jeopardy).
Basic patterns: Cultures (English , German, Scandinavian, Chinese, Japanese) with high emotional restraint concepts have little public touch; those which encourage emotion (Latino, Middle-East, Jewish) accept frequent touches.


8. Smell
 
• USA — fear of offensive natural smells (billion dollar industry to mask objectionable odors with what is perceived to be pleasant ) — again connected with “attractiveness” concept.
• Many other cultures consider natural body odors as normal (Arabic).
• Asian cultures (Filipino, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Indian) stress frequent bathing — and often criticize USA of not bathing often enough!

 
9. Paralanguage
 
• vocal characterizers (laugh, cry, yell, moan, whine, belch, yawn).  These send different messages in different cultures (Japan — giggling indicates embarrassment; India – belch indicates satisfaction)
• vocal qualifiers (volume, pitch, rhythm, tempo, and tone).  Loudness indicates strength in Arabic cultures and softness indicates weakness; indicates confidence and authority to the Germans,; indicates impoliteness to the Thais; indicates loss of control to the Japanese. (Generally, one learns not to “shout” in Asia for nearly any reason!).  Gender based as well: women tend to speak higher and more softly than men.
• vocal segregates (un-huh, shh, uh, ooh, mmmh, humm, eh, mah, lah).  Segregates indicate formality, acceptance, assent, uncertainty.

Creole Languages: yiddish, Spanglish? Ebonics?

The structure and function of Creole Languages

• the process of pidginization
• simplification and reduction
• the process of creolization
• elaboration and expansion
• the post-creole continuum
• ongoing interaction with language of power

How Yiddish Could Save the Jewish People

INTERVIEW...Culture & Yiddish

Language, Not Marriage or Religious Practice, Key to Continuity

riverside films

Passport to Peoplehood: Learning Yiddish gave Jordan Kutzik a better crash course on being Jewish than any day school could offer.

By Jordan Kutzik

The American Jewish community and its media frequently express concern about the Jewish future in America, citing mounting rates of assimilation and increasingly liberal trends in religious practice. In this discussion, intermarriage is frequently conceived of as being both the standard measure and the primary symptom of just how assimilated Jews are. What is usually left out of the discussion is any mention of linguistic assimilation.

In fact, most American Jews conceive of the Jewish people as being a religious group but rarely note the important role that Jewish ethnic and cultural heritage as expressed through language has traditionally played in Jewish survival.

The fact that many Jews cannot even conceive of ways of maintaining and transmitting their identity other than through religion testifies to the fact that outside of their religious affiliation, the vast majority of Jews are, culturally and linguistically speaking, hardly different from other Americans.

While religion has always played a central role in Jewish identity, Jews have also traditionally identified as not just members of the wider Jewish people, but also of specific Jewish ethnicities defined by Jewish languages. These languages, along with their respective cultures, foods and folklores, were, for the majority of Jewish history, the primary mechanism by which Jewish continuity was preserved. The knowledge of Yiddish, Ladino or one of the other Jewish languages of the Diaspora (for example, Bukhari, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Aramaic) marked one’s identity as a member of the group. There was less need for debate about who was and was not a Jew. Whether a person was religious, a closeted heretic or an open Epicurus, she was a Jew if she spoke a Jewish language as her mother tongue.

• connections to Jewish heritage are typically through Jewish culture rather than religion:
•  learning Yiddish and Hebrew songs, hearing klezmer music, reading Sholom Aleichem’s stories, and cooking kugel and matzo brei with my mother.

• Languages are not just vehicles for communication; they are the storehouse in which culture, tradition and wisdom reside. Languages are the lifeblood of a people. For Jewish people, uniquely Jewish languages and cultures also served as the body in which the religious soul resided and was reproduced across the generations.  
• Jewish values are so built into the language that even the most mundane conversations in Yiddish about politics or sports feel more Jewish to most than conversations about the Talmud in English. 
• This is because the idioms used to praise, to condemn and lampoon are often in and of themselves quotations from Jewish scripture. A good example: “vi esroygim nokh sukes” (like etrogs after Sukkot— that is, objects that had already fulfilled their purpose and were now useless).

Learning a Jewish language, of course, is not a magic bullet in the fight for Jewish survival and should not serve as the sole basis of Jewish education. But at a time when a high rate of Jewish intermarriage outside Orthodox communities is a given, religion alone doesn’t guarantee Jewish continuity. And at a time when the internal Jewish communal dialogue around Israel is increasingly polarized and off-putting, Israel alone is not enough to guarantee Jewish continuity in America. We need an element that has kept us together no matter what we are saying to one another. It might be time to turn to language to bond us as a people.

Spanglish: Identity Preservation or Language Destruction?

Awesome Power Point on Issues

Living in Spanglish (watch)

language is not only a method of communication, but also an element that represents our cultural identity. If it is precisely our cultural inheritance the component that we intend to protect by teaching our language to our children, why [intentionally] destroy the shared core of our cultures?

Spanglish is informal due to the lack of structure and set rules. From a linguistic point of view, Spanglish often is mistakenly labeled many things.

• Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish, because although people claim to be native speakers of Spanglish, Spanglish itself has not yet become a language on its own but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence of the other language. 
• Spanglish is the fluid exchange of language between English and Spanish, present in the heavy influence in the words and phrases used by the speaker. 
• Spanglish is currently considered a hybrid language by linguists—many actually refer to Spanglish as "Spanish-English code-switching", though there is some influence of borrowing, and lexical and grammatical shifts as well.

The inception of Spanglish is due to the influx of Latin American people into North America, specifically the United States of America. Spanglish can be separated into two different categories: code switching or borrowing, and lexical and grammatical shifts.

• For example, a fluent bilingual speaker addressing another bilingual speaker might engage in code switching with the sentence, "I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting porque tengo una obligación de negocios en Boston, pero espero que I'll be back for the meeting the week after"—which means, "I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting because I have a business obligation in Boston, but I hope to be back for the meeting the week after."

Identity and Spanglish

The usage of Spanglish is often associated with an individual's association with identity (in terms of language learning) and reflects how many minority-American cultures feel toward their heritage. Commonly in ethnic communities within the United States, the knowledge of one's heritage language signifies if one is truly of a member of their culture.

• Just as Spanish helps individuals identify with their Spanish identity, Spanglish is slowly becoming the poignant realization of the Hispanic-American's, especially Mexican-American's, identity within the United States. 
• Individuals of Hispanic descent living in America face living in two very different worlds and need a new sense of bi-cultural and bilingual identity of their own experience. 
• Living within the United States creates a synergy of culture and struggles for many Mexican-Americans. The hope to retain their cultural heritage/language and their dual-identity in American society is one of the major factors that lead to the creation of Spanglish. 

Attitudes Towards Spanglish

Spanglish is a misunderstood skill because often times, “pure” Spanish speakers denounce Spanglish. In fact, Spanglish is not about necessarily assimilating to English—it is about acculturating and accommodating. Still, Spanglish has variously been accused of corrupting and endangering the “real” Spanish language, and holding kids back, though linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as a "pure" or "real" language.

• Presently, “Spanglish” is still viewed by most as a rather derogatory and patronizing word to its community because it seems like a “bastardized language”. In reality, Spanglish has its own culture and has a reputation of its own. 
• It is commonly assumed that Spanglish is a jargon: part Spanish and part English, with neither gravitas nor a clear identity, says the author of Spanglish and proponent of Spanglish, Ilan Stavans. 
•  Use of the word Spanglish reflects the wide range of views towards the mixed language in the United States. 
• In Latino communities, the term Spanglish is used in a positive and proud connotation by political leaders. 
• It is also used by Linguists and scholars promoted for use in literary writing. 
• Despite the promotion of positive usage of the term by activists and scholars alike, the term is often used with a negative connotation disparagingly. 
• People often refer to themselves as 'Spanglish speakers' if they do not speak Spanish well. 
• The term Spanglish is also often used as a disparaging way to describe individuals that do not speak English fluently and are in the process of learning, assuming the inclusion of Spanglish as a lack of English fluency.