[Xmca-l] Re: What is a Pedagogy of the Oppressors?

[HENRY SHONERD]

Larry and y’all,
Way back three days ago Larry posted the following under the subject heading Primer of “A Primer of Culture and Semantics”:

"To others who like myself do not have a background in linguistics, I offer
a very short 5 page essay that summarizes concisely the exploration of
semantics within culture and language and cognition studies in the last
century.”

Heres’s the link Larry provided:
http://www.revue-texto.net/Inedits/Manjali_Culture.html <http://www.revue-texto.net/Inedits/Manjali_Culture.html>

I am wondering if metaphor and embodied cognition, as per the work of Lakoff and others, might be considered of use in the current thread. Oppression has the hallmarks of of a generative metaphor and this thread, oppression, and a way out of the opression itself might be fruitfully construed in the light of dialog/discourse analysis. Of especial interest to me is the final paragraph of the article:

"It may be concluded from the above deliberations that after defining the basic premises of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, Lakoff 1987), mainly on the basis of earlier works on natural categorisation in psychology (Rosch), anthropological linguistics (Berlin and Kay), philosophy (Wittgenstein) and sociolinguistics (Labov), cognitive linguists turned to issues which had been the main object of linguistic inquiry before the advent of generative theory. Langacker (1991) offered a number of analyses of different linguistic phenomena utilising the earlier defined notions and premises of cognitive linguistics. It has become necessary to verify theoretical constructs and predictions in terms of new empirical data. Two areas of research seem to be particularly promising in this context: cognitive analysis of discourse (Langacker 1999, Langacker 2001) and cognitive description of the language acquisition processes. Both of these research domains offer massive corpora of unidealized, raw linguistic data. Attempts to describe discourse may serve to demonstrate how linguistic knowledge is utilised by real users in real context, while attempts aimed at describing the process of language acquisition may demonstrate how this knowledge is really shaped in contextualised grammatical ontogenesis under the pressure of various mental and environmental factors. On the other hand, Langacker’s (2000) dynamic usage-based model may well provide a more adequate framework for an insightful and comprehensive description of the mechanisms of language acquisition. The future of cognitively motivated research on language acquisition seems to be promising."

Just wondering.

Henry


> On Jan 5, 2015, at 4:44 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
> 
> Larry and others,
> 
> I am interested in "structures of feeling." Would you recommend anything in particular by Williams?
> 
> I think I am with you (if this is what you are saying) that a vocabulary of sensing and feeling are important and frequently overlooked or swept under the carpet as if feeling were proof of weakness and not of humanity. 
> 
> Also please recommend any reading by Levinas?
> 
> Thank you for your additions to the soup.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Annalisa
>