When people who interact do not share the same abilities, orientations, or beliefs, the results are often disastrous, leaving everyone involved feeling misunderstood, underappreciated, and resentful. Why does this happen? How can we find and focus on the strengths in our differences, rather than the weaknesses? How can we accept that our differences bring with them different ways of looking at a problem, and that these different ways of looking at things lead to unique, and sometimes conflicting, solutions to problems?
Talk That Counts is a sociolinguistic study of variation in discourse employing quantitative methods to explore age, gender, and social class differences in the use of features such as you know, I mean, adverbs, and pronouns. Unlike many studies of discourse variation that focus on a single social factor, Talk That Counts examines age, gender, and social class differences in a gender-balanced sample of middle-class and working-class adolescents and adults, recorded under the same conditions. Differences between adults and adolescents provided the greatest number of statistically significant results, followed by differences between males and females. The smallest number of statistically significant differences were related to social class. The range of variation underlines the need to look at more than a single extra-linguistic variable when examining discourse. It also shows the dangers of generalizing about social class, for example, on the basis of a limited sample (e.g., adolescent boys). In Talk That Counts, distinguished sociolinguist Ronald Macaulay presents an important new approach to the sociolinguistic investigation of discourse variation.
Is native speaker variation in understanding complex sentences due to
individual differences in working memory capacity or in syntactic
competence? The answer to this question has very important consequences
for both theoretical and applied concerns in linguistics and education.
This book is distinctive in giving an historical and interdisciplinary
perspective on the rule- based and experience-based debate and in
supporting an integrated account. In the study reported here, variation
was found to be due to differences in syntactic competence and the
author argues that sentence comprehension is a learned skill,
displaying many of the general characteristics of cognitive skills. The
book will be stimulating reading for psycholinguists, theoretical
linguists, applied linguists and educators.
Linguistic relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparison
Christian Greiffenhagen and Wes Sharrock
Linguistic relativism is the thesis that the grammatical structures of different languages imply different conceptions of reality. In this paper we critically discuss one form of linguistic relativism, which argues that grammatical differences between the English and Yoruba language exhibit differences in how English and Yoruba speakers ‘see’ reality (namely in terms of ‘spatiotemporal particulars’ and ‘sortal particulars’, respectively).
We challenge the idea that linguistic relativism is an empirical thesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. We show that linguistic relativism is based on two assumptions: firstly, that the purpose of language is to describe the world; secondly, that being able to speak presupposes an ontological theory of the ultimate constituents of the world. We argue that the attempt to extract the outline of that theory from the language inevitably distorts the portrayal of language-using practice itself.
I Accept You As You Are THE BEST ME I CAN series This book is about accepting differences in people. Recognizing and accepting that there are differences among their peers is an important step for children at this stage of development. Trying to embrace these differences without losing their own sense of self is an essential concept addressed in this book.
Linguistic relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparison
