The focus speakers abstracts are listed below. Please select the paper you are interested to read its abstract.
A Linguistic Approach in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classrooms
The presenter describes the challenges and successes of applying a linguistic approach to the teaching of science in a 4th grade classroom. Drawing on different data sources, including classroom lessons and planning meetings between a teacher educator and a teacher, the presenter identifies patterns of discourse that enable language development and science learning.
Sociolinguistic investigations of inequality in the legal process
This talk will address the question: what can sociolinguistic research reveal about inequality in the legal process? In answering this question, I will draw on studies which show how talk is used to control, coerce or dominate participants in courtroom hearings. Moving beyond situated power relations, I will address two wider questions of sociolinguistic concern: what are the social consequences of these situated inequalities? how do language ideologies enable discursive practices within legal contexts which perpetuate social inequalities?
Working on the Intercultural Language Teacher
This talk will bring to the front different trends that are converging in contemporary applied linguistics and language teaching research with the aim of drawing implications for the training of future language teachers. The questioning of native speaker authority in applied linguistics, together with the formulation of intercultural communicative competence as the natural aim of first and second language learners have appeared in an increasingly globalized context in which the former notions of national language, monolingual speaker and native speaker are called into question at the same time as the uses of languages for international communication are ever more frequent.
In the area of second language teaching, the teacher has ceased to be the central figure in the language classroom, as the focus in language pedagogy has shifted towards learner-centred approaches. However, the teacher still remains a fundamental element in language teaching, and the training of language teachers poses a challenge to training programmes and institutions, since the successful outcome of language education efforts still greatly rely on the skills of the language teacher.
The fundamental purpose of this talk is to discuss the results of empirical research dealing with the characteristics of the intercultural language teacher and present ideas for the training of such a teacher, emphasizing the need for a de-nativized de-centred and de-standardised perspective on language and language teaching, while making a strong case for the qualities of non-native high-awareness multicompetent intercultural teachers.
Semantic representation and natural meaning
Semantics is distinctive among the core linguistics disciplines in the general lack of agreement over the basic theoretical questions at its centre. Langacker’s (1987: 32) complaint about ‘the striking lack of consensus about the proper characterization of even the simplest or most fundamental linguistic phenomena’ applies to questions of meaning even more than it does in other linguistic subfields, and theoretical proliferation in the years that separate us from 1987 has only increased the diversity of approaches available. From one point of view, this diversity is a major source of semantics’ vitality and interest. But given most investigators’ goal – the construction of a naturalistic theory of language – the field’s inability to reach agreement on even the most basic questions is highly discouraging. In this talk I venture some suggestions about possible causes of, and repairs for, this situation. I suggest that the impasse in current semantic theorizing stems from two widely made assumptions linguists bring to the analysis of meaning. The first assumption compromises the representational naturalness of the semantic structures posited in linguistics. Many theorists claim that semantic structure and conceptual structure are identical, but do this without any serious effort to characterize non-linguistic conceptual structure independently. I suggest that research needs to bring about a closer alignment between the semantic representations assumed to underlie language, and the types of representation required to explain non-linguistic cognition. Only if this happens can the claim that semantic and conceptual structure are identical be non-vacuous, and constraints be placed on the types of possible semantic representation discerned in language. The second assumption concerns the discourse naturalness of semantic representations. Linguists’ tacit assumption that semantic structure is constant over different discourse contexts is, I suggest, implausible. Instead, it seems likely that semantic structure varies as a function of the factors (degree of attention, planning, formality, etc.) known to affect most other levels of linguistic structure. A fruitful direction for semantic research may, I suggest, entail greater attention being given to these two dimensions of naturalness.
What we can learn from an incarnational perspective
The linguist’s theoretical account of language provides a conceptual tool for analyzing not only language but also other forms of human semiosis, including images, the visual arts and music. The theoretical approach taken here aims at the description of language as a social semiotic system, focusing on its role in defining human experience, and enacting social relationships.
Thinking semiotically gives us a new vantage point from which to pursue a knowledge of phenomena around which the human mind perpetually seems to circle but which it never attains. Once we begin to think in terms of meaning, however, it all begins to make sense. Meaning is a prerequisite for reflection and interaction. Meaning enables us to ‘contemplate, in thought, as in a Picture, the image of a greater and better world’, and to share that thinking with others.
An emphasis on meaning is evident in W.K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. O’Donoghue, in an essay on Wimsatt Verbal Icon, describes how Wimsatt “attempts to trace the link between form and meaning, overcoming the traditional assignment of each element to one or the other (metre to form, literary history to content, and so on)” (O’Donoghue 2002:146). In the case of rhyme, for example, Wimsatt “argues that the traditional assigning of rhyme to form as a kind of separate collaborator with sense fails to recognize the ways in which the choice of rhyme is often influenced by the demands of meaning” (149) O’Donoghue goes on to say: “It may not be putting it too strongly to call his project partly theological; an attempt to see the ‘hylomorphic union’ of content and form – defined in Christian theology as the essence of divinity – as informing the whole of literary culture” (2002:146).
This unity of content and form, abstract and concrete, thoughts and things, is revealed in the incarnational aesthetic of Flannery O’Connor, the American novelist and short-story writer, whose art sought to “reunite what the modern mind has severed” (Bieber 1999). In her dissertation entitled “The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor”, Christina Marie Bieber writes, “For O’Connor, art, like the Incarnation, presents a grotesque body instead of making an abstract argument; it reveals through the concrete, particular, untidy and communal nature of human experience – not in spite of it” (ibid.).
Meaning and matter are joined in the activity of conscious and communicative human beings in community. To put it another way, meaning and matter come together in the mix of human interactivity. Neither meaning or matter exist apart from the other, nor can either be fully known apart from knowing what it means to be human.
This paper has been withdrawn.
The Language Particular Basis of Lexical Categories
The necessity of defining lexical categories/word classes/parts of speech in language specific terms has long been a mainstay of linguistic theory. While there may be a semantic core to the definitions of lexical categories, e.g. nouns denote objects and verbs, events, it has long been observed that this is not a necessary linkage, i. e. meetings is a noun in English, yet it denotes events. This has led to a robust requirement in linguistic theory that lexical categories be determined and defined on language internal structural criteria, language specific facts. Still, and seemingly almost a contradiction, many linguists hold that the distinction between the categories of noun and verb is a universal one; although being recognized as structural classes by language specific facts, nouns and verbs are nonetheless a distinction that informs the grammars of all languages. Most commonly the analyses proposed are inductive ones: assume a prototypical meaning of nouns and verbs, investigate the structural behavior of roots which exemplify this meaning, and then motivate the distinction in the light of these structural facts; Croft (2001) is a typical example of this well known approach. Unfortunately, it suffers seriously from circularity in its reasoning and an underdeveloped theory of lexical meaning and the role of polysemy. A more recent and perhaps more successful deductive approach is illustrated by Baker: posit universal structural definitions of nouns and verbs as a theoretical move and then see if their behavior in every language matches the predictions of the theory. This approach, however, requires all languages to exhibit at least one core core crosslinguistic structural trait which validates the structural definitions offered. This paper will argue that neither of these approaches is completely adequate to motivate a universal lexical contrast of noun and verb, by investigating problematic data in English, Austronesian, Salish and Wakashan languages. We must conclude that in the present state of our knowledge, there appear to be no grounds for believing that this contrast is universal and that the division of roots into lexical categories is an entirely language specific fact, although it may be guided in large part by wider semantic considerations.
References
Baker, M. 2003. Lexical Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.