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How language relates to national identity
Language and cultural identity summary
Language and cultural identity essay
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James Paul Gee explores the idea of discourse as a series of sentences that are modified based on context and recipient, in order to convey a particular meaning. Discourse is modified according to the recipient’s familiarity with the speaker/writer. The level of familiarity influences whether the speaker/writer uses vernacular, or non-vernacular language to express himself. Additionally, discourse changes according to social identities. Gee provides an example by describing a conversation between a waiter and his costumer. The costumer enacts his identity as a costumer, which is recognized by the waiter, who in turn modifies the language he uses to addresses him. Similarly, the costumer recognizes the identity of the waiter as waiter and proceeds
to address him accordingly. These identities are recognized based on what Gee refers to as discourse records or associations. Discourse association is the categorization of every interaction based on previously experienced ones. For example, a student recognizes the identity of a professor and modifies his language based on previews experiences he has had with other professors throughout his lifetime. Furthermore, discourse is modified through context. The author poses the following sentence, “Clean it up” (97) in order to illustrate how context can change its meaning. He elaborates by writing that if a cup of coffee were spilled, the sentence would mean to clean the coffee up with a mop, but if crumbs were spilled, the sentence would mean to clean the crumbs up with a broom.
Edward O. Wilson, the writer of this satire, writes about the opinions of two disagreeing sides to demonstrate the unproductive nature of these litigations. To do this, the author writes in a horatian manner and uses instances of exaggeration, parody, incongruity, and irony to help him convey his message that these arguments are pointless. The well distributed use of these strategies allows the writer to efficiently illustrate and mock the unproductive disagreement of these two groups of people.
Comello, M. G. William James on 'possible selves': Implications for studying identity in communication contexts (2009). Communication Theory.
Language is truly part of our identity: our languages shape who we are. That is why we always have to be tolerant and comprehensive with others’ accents, typical phrases, or grammatical errors. Writers that really make an impact when referring to language and identity are Gloria Anzaldua and Amy Tan, with their readings “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “Mother Tongue” respectively. These two writers, with completely different backgrounds, shared their views about how language and identity are intertwined.
In this paper, James Paul Gee states his opinion on the definition of literacy. He begins by redefining the word “discourse” and uses it frequently throughout the paper. Gee defines discourse as a group that you are socially linked to through your actions and thoughts. This group defines who you are in society. He then uses the beginning of his paper to continue explaining “discourses”. The main points he covers are that discourses are defined by history and culture and therefore, change through time. Also, he explains that one is involved in many different discourses. This might cause one to break rules or understandings of one discourse to align with a dissimilar one.
David Foster Wallace, author of the essay “Authority and American Usage*,” praises and advocates for “good” writers who have a strong rhetorical ability, which he defines as “the persuasive use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of an audience” (Wallace 628). To have a strong rhetorical ability, an author needs to be aware of whom their audience is, in order to present their information in a way that will be influential on their audience. Wallace recognizes that an author who applies a strong rhetorical ability will be able to connect with the audience so that they respond “not just to [their] utterance but also to [them]” (Wallace 641). An author needs to take into consideration not just content, syntax and grammatical structure (their “utterance”) but also how their character will be perceived by their audience. A positive tone will make the author seem more pleasant and relatable, whereas a negative tone connotes arrogance and pretentiousness. That is why it is crucial for an author to recognize that an audience will respond to “them” and not just their “utterance,” as an author’s appearance to their readers can also shape how impactful their writing is.
Pages 261- 267. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.006. Cameron, D. (2001). The 'Case Working with spoken discourse and communication. London: Thousand Oaks & Co. Carson, C., & Cupach, W. (2000).
The one characteristic that makes humans who we are is our ability to adapt. Whether this is in terms of weather, geography, or even through our speech, people adapt to our environment. In “Speaking in Tongues”, the author Zadie Smith, expresses her own literacy journey/metamorphosis and how her voice had changed as a result of her environment and inadvertently also changed her identity. While explaining this, she also connects her own experiences in a larger social context with well known examples such as William Shakespeare and our current president Barack Obama. We speak differently depending on where we are and to whom we surround ourselves; this is evident in the way that Zadie Smith, Barack Obama, William Shakespeare, and I speak and
Americans and British both speak English language, however the characters are faced with some challenges in verbal communication. So American English and British English shape the identity of the speaker. The writer who comes from Britain emphasises the importance of her title. She is also very cautious with use of names. She believes that strangers, acquaintances and friends have to address each other differently. This shows that English is a verbal culture.
The diction that one uses can provoke a varied response, as seen in articles by Amy Tan and Firoozeh Dumas. Tan’s work, “Mother Tongue”, reminisces several anecdotes related to her mother’s “broken English” and the negative reactions by advanced English speakers. Tan recognizes her own tendency, when at home or with family, to slip back into the
A student from Carnegie Mellon University once said, “Life is all about finding our identity.” In the novel The Catcher In The Rye, by Jerome David Salinger, the protagonist, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield undertakes the search for identity throughout the novel. To analyze Holden’s journey in search of identity, one must first define the term. A former tutor of mine suggested the idea that an identity is made up of a series of competing discourses acting against each other. A discourse, in the simplest of definitions is a written or spoken thought exchanged in the community. Over the history of sociology and philosophy, the term ‘discourse’ has come to describe the conversations of a group of people who have certain ideals in common. In
Schiffrin, Deborah; Tannen, Deborah and Hamilton Heidi E, eds. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001.
Officially, discourse analysis realized as a new systematic contextualized discipline in language studies in 1970s (Van Dijk5-7).Thenceforth, languagescholars studied the relations between textual and contextual components of discoursewithin more developed conjoining perspectives,namely psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semiolinguistics, pragmalinguistics. Howbeit, contributions to literary discourse analysishavebeen so far both insubstantial and slippery. Leafing through books and articles by discourse analysts like Hassan and Halliday, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Theo van Leeowen, Teun A. Van Dijk,etc., proves how literature suffers marginalization in the field. Even when Malcolm Coulthard (1985) devotes a chapter to literature– significantly enough, the last chapter of his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis – he carries out a detailed analysis of the stylistic features of a literary text stringently within a linguistic fabric.
Her approach is capable of identifying and describing the underlying mechanisms that contribute to those disorders in discourse which are embedded in a particular context, at a specific moment, and inevitably affect communication. Wodak’s work on the discourse of anti-Semitism in 1990 led to the development of an approach she termed the Discourse-Historical Method. The term historical occupies a unique place in this approach. It denotes an attempt to systematically integrate all available background information in the analysis and interpretation of the many layers of a written or spoken text. As a result, the study of Wodak and her colleagues’ showed that the context of the discourse had a significant impact on the structure, function, and context of the utterances. This method is based on the belief that language “manifests social processes and interaction” and generates those processes as well (Wodak & Ludwig, 1999, p. 12). This method analyses language from a three-fold perspective: first, the assumption that discourse involves power and ideologies. “No interaction exists where power relations do not prevail and where values and norms do not have a relevant role” (p. 12). Secondly, “discourse … is always historical, that is, it is connected synchronically and diachronically with other communicative events which are happening at the same time or which have happened before” (p. 12). The third feature
The book An Intorduction of Sociolinguistics is an outstanding introductary book in the field of sociolinguistics. It encompasses a wide range of language issues. In chapter 13, Wardhaugh provides a good insight to the relationship between language and gender. He explains gender differences of language-in-use with concise examples. Wardhaugh riases questions about sexist language and guides readers to look closer at how people use language differently because of their own gender in daily life. According to the Whorfian hypothesis, which indicates that the way people use language reflects their thoughts, different genders adapt different communication strategies.
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of