[Xmca-l] Re: Deficit linguistics

[David Kellogg]

Yes, I meant the section here:

http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu/polyphonic-autobiography/section-1/chapter-2/

See "Cultural Difference Not Cognitive Deficit".

It's a short section, and the inquiry is broken off at the threshold.
Labov's two conclusions are that his findings with Leon apply to the work
on IQ testing, and that having the right social situation is key to finding
out what children can really do. Of course, if that's really true that
implies that there is some fixed semantic "what children can really do"
which then varies across social situations. Is there?

Labov is treating black English as if it were a dialect--a variant way of
saying the same thing. That's why his best work focuses on phonological
variation: you go into a range of New York department stores and you ask
for men's fashions, and some of the shop assistants say "fourth floor" and
some say "for't floor" and some say "fo' floor", and you treat this, quite
justifiably, as ways of saying exactly the same thing. That's also why his
explanation of the copula deletion problem (when you can say "They
ignorant", to return to Wacqant's data) is phonological. You can say it
whenever contraction is possible ("They're ignorant") and you can't say it
otherwise ("Yes, they are").

But suppose there are three things to explain and not just two? That is,
suppose "They ignorant" and "They are ignorant" and "They're ignorant" are
not simply three ways of saying exactly the same thing, but actually three
ways of saying slightly different things? If you could ask Wacqant's
informants for a fuller expansion of "They ignorant" (e.g. "What did you
say? They...?" or, more invasively, "Can you give me THREE words and not
TWO?") they might say something like "They IS ignorant" or "They's
ignorant" rather than "They're ignorant", because in black English (and
increasingly in white English, because of the problem of gendered
pronouns--"every student must bring their book) "they" often takes the
singular. So we don't just have two different ways of saying exactly the
same wording. We have different wordings.

Now, do these different wordings (different lexico-grammars) have exactly
the same meaning? Labov's answer was yes--their meaning was exactly the
same, or at least it could be, because meaning exists essentially outside
language, in the social context. Ruqaiya's answer was no--their meaning
could not be exactly the same, because social context is in its turn
construed (understood, constructed of semiotic material) by wordings. So
the interpersonal meaning of "They ignorant" is not the same as "They are
ignorant", and even "They IS ignorant" is not the same as "They are
ignorant". (I even think that the ideational meaning is different, because
"they" with a singular verb suggests a kind of monolithic,
homogenous "they" rather than a multivariate, heterogeneous one.)

Just as Hasan loved Labov's methods but hated his methodological
conclusions, Vygotsky loved Piaget's methods, but hated his methodology. He
saw Piaget's explanations as functionalist (and Piaget agreed). For
Vygotsky, function can explain structure, but function too needs to be
explained, and what explains it is not more functions (turtles all the way
down!) but rather the way in which functions change through history.
Similarly, for Hasan, grammar does explain phonological variation (rather
than, as Labov believed, the other way around), but grammatical variation
too needs explanation, and what explains it are variations in meaning,
understood to include interpersonal and textual meanings, and not just
"truth values".

I am reading Braudel. On the one hand, he is full of expressions that no
anthropologist would ever use, including "savage", "pitiable", "wild",
"miserable" and of course "primitive", and he says that "culture" is weaker
and inferior to "civilization". On the other, the way he uses these
expressions shows us, at almost every turn, that his real goal is to
explain how one of these savage, pitiable, and primitive forms of social
organization--our own--was able to wipe out others. The "Cultural
Difference Not Cognitive Deficit" section breaks off at the threshold,
because it doesn't explain how one cultural difference is able to wipe out
all the others. I don't think non-linguistic factors are ever irrelevant,
but for precisely that reason I don't think they can stay non-linguistic
for long, if they ever were in the first place.



David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 4:41 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> David (Kellogg),
> In a previous post, you wrote:
> "The existence or non-existence of semantic variation is the key issue
> which divided Hasan and Labov, and without it we cannot really make sense
> of the debate over "deficit linguistics" which appears briefly in the lchc
> polyphonic autobiography."
>
> I wonder if you might be willing to expand on this a bit (perhaps in all
> directions - help us understand its role in the lchc autobio as well as
> with Hasan and Labov as well as how you make sense of it). I find it to be
> an important and really complex issue and I'd love to hear others' takes on
> it.
>
> Cheers,
> Greg
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>