[Xmca-l] Re: Deficit linguistics

[mike cole]

Re Labov--

In the following chapter of the lchcautobio there is a brief discussion of
our own research concerning Labov's conclusions:

http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu/polyphonic-autobiography/section-2/chapter-3/

A more detailed account for those interested is attached.


mike


On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 1:09 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
>
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