The actions of affect are prominent in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and can be broken down for the purposes of education into two roles. The first alludes to the history of philosophy and the ways in which affect has been used by Spinoza (Deleuze, 1992) Nietzsche (Deleuze, 1983) or Bergson (Deleuze, 1991). In this role, Deleuze reinvigorates and challenges definitions of affect that would place them into systems of understanding that could take paths to metaphysics or to becoming paradigms (...) for capture in any further theorisation of affect. For example, scholars might attest to the use of affect as defined by Spinoza in the Ethics. Deleuze (1983, 1991, 1992) attends to the ways in which scholarly understanding of affect has been broached in order to free the idea up for empirical studies and also to show that the power of didactic language may be subsumed and subverted. The second role of affect in the work of Deleuze comes about in his first two co-authored books that he produced with Félix Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 1988). These publications have a distinct purpose from the scholarly work, which this article shall examine in terms of educational activism, group identities and the sociology of education. This level imbues the use of language in pedagogic acts with an intense affective resonance and the multiple traces of becoming that might be present in any teaching and learning context. (shrink)

Based on the novel data collected through original fieldwork on five syntactic phenomena (the position of the finite verb in embedded clauses, in sentences with a modal verb, negative concord, position of focused light/heavy objects in main clauses with a complex tense, scrambling) in the heritage language Mòcheno, we show that i) there exist two populations – one exhibiting intra-speaker variation between German and Italian word orders, and one lacking it; ii) these two populations are the result of diatopic variation (...) and, to a lesser extent, of diastratic variation. The results reached through quantitative statistical analysis are partially convergent with those arrived at by traditional theoretical syntax on Mòcheno, but our analysis has allowed us to shed new light on a series of so-far neglected or poorly understood phenomena. More specifically, we discovered that there exists micro-variation fed by diastratic (age) variation within the Roveda variety, which represents the only case in Mòcheno in which age is a relevant factor in determining variation. We also showed that the traditional claim that the Palù variety is “more German” than the other Mòcheno variety is surely to be confirmed, but we could refine it by showing that German word orders are also accepted by speakers of other varieties and that the acceptability of these word orders in competition with the Italian syntax is not fed by the age of speakers (no diastratic variation). Finally, we showed that the acceptance of German word orders across speakers varies according to the phenomenon investigated: negation is the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be accepted, whereas embedded clauses are the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be rejected. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive construction of a professional flight attendant identity in a corpus of reports written by FAs and voluntarily submitted to a US government agency. The article argues that writing and submission of the reports by FAs can be seen as a performative act, which heightens aviation institutional ideologies whilst foregrounding safety-related practices. Moreover, the narratives make frequent use of the intersubjective relation of adequation and distinction in their situated construction of identity, with FAs excluding pilots from (...) discursive constructions of the inflight crew. This distancing of pilots is counter to the “team” ideology in commercial aviation upon which much flight safety is predicated. (shrink)

Sociolinguists study the interaction between language and society. Variationist sociolinguistics — the subfield of sociolinguistics which is the focus of this issue — uses empirical and quantitative methods to study the production and perception of linguistic variation. Linguistic variation refers to how speakers choose between linguistic forms that say the same thing in different ways, with the variants differing in their social meaning. For example, how frequently someone says fishin’ or fishing depends on a number of factors, such as the (...) speaker's regional and social background and the formality of the speech event. Likewise, if listeners are asked to use a rating scale make judgements about speakers who say fishin’ or fishing, their ratings depend on what other social characteristics are attributed to the speaker. This issue aims to reflect the growing number of interactions that bring variationist sociolinguistics into contact of different branches of cognitive science. After presenting current trends in sociolinguistics, we identify five areas of contact between the two fields: cognitive sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic cognition, acquisition of variation, computational modeling, and a comparative approach of variation in animal communication. We then explain the benefits of interdisciplinary work: fostering the study of variability and cultural diversity in cognition; bringing together data and modeling; understanding the cognitive mechanisms through which sociolinguistic variation is processed; examining indexical meaning; exploring links between different levels of grammar; and improving methods of data collection and analysis. Finally we explain how the articles in this issue contribute to each of these benefits. We conclude by suggesting that sociolinguistics holds a strategic position for facing the challenge of building theories of language through integrating its linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects at the collective and individual levels. (shrink)

Optimization is about finding the best available object with respect to an objective function. Mathematics and quantitative sciences have been highly successful in formulating problems as optimization problems, and constructing clever processes that find optimal objects from sets of objects. As computers have become readily available to most people, optimization and optimized processes play a very broad role in societies. It is not obvious, however, that the optimization processes that work for mathematics and abstract objects should be readily applied to (...) complex and open social systems. In this paper we set forth a framework to understand when optimization is limited, particularly for complex and open social systems. (shrink)

Focusing on Guattari and Deleuze's collaborative critique of structural linguistics, this article claims that rather than offering an ‘escape from language’, Guattari and Deleuze recast language as a social and political practice. Through a reading of Guattari and Deleuze's analysis of Saussure, their reinterpretation of Hjelmslev, and a discussion of the concepts of order-words and minor use of language, the article shows how, to do this, the authors develop a social and semiotic critique whereby the very concept of language changes (...) from representation to intervention in a material and social field. (shrink)

Buson, Nardy, Muller & Chevrot (2018) report two experiments ‐ a repetition task and a judgment task ‐ based on the phenomenon of sociolinguistic restoration. When people repeat utterances mixing standard and non‐standard variants, they make them homogeneous. The results suggest that coherent cognitive representation of the sociolinguistic varieties influences the reconstruction of the mixed heard utterance during the repetition. Using the repetition task could help understanding how sociolinguistic cues are organized in memory.

This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games, which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of (...) game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena :645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7:561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8:230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation using signalling games and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework :3–44, 2016, for recent overviews). (shrink)

The potential use, relevance, and application of AI and other technologies in the democratic process may be obvious to some. However, technological innovation and, even, its consideration may face an intuitive push-back in the form of algorithm aversion (Dietvorst et al. J Exp Psychol 144(1):114–126, 2015). In this paper, I confront this intuition and suggest that a more ‘extreme’ form of technological change in the democratic process does not necessarily result in a worse outcome in terms of the fundamental concepts (...) of democracy and the Rule of Law. To provoke further consideration and illustrate that initial intuitions regarding democratic innovation may not always be accurate, I pose and explore four ways that AI and other forms of technology could be used to augment the representative democratic process. The augmentations range from voting online to the wholesale replacement of the legislature’s human representatives with algorithms. After first noting the intuition that less invasive forms of augmented democracy may be less objectionable than more extreme forms, I go on to critically assess whether the augmentation of existing systems satisfies or enhances ideas associated with democracy and the Rule of Law (provided by Dahl and Fuller). By imagining a (not too far-fetched) future in a (not too far-removed) democratic society, my conclusion is that, when it comes to democracy and the Rule of Law, intuitions regarding technology may lead us astray. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in language acquisition and sociolinguistics, I problematize the traditional idealizing assumption that a person’s mental lexicon consists of two distinct parts—a dictionary, comprising her knowledge of word meanings proper, and an encyclopedia, comprising her wider knowledge of worldly affairs. I argue that the breakdown of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction can be given a cognitive and functional (...) explanation: facts regarding language learning and the challenges of coping with linguistically diverse environments require that dictionary and encyclopedia remain deeply integrated rather than categorically distinct dimensions of the mental lexicon. This argument provides support for a psychologized version of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘Derangement’: there is no such thing as a language, in the sense that there is no diachro.. (shrink)

Diachronic studies of discourse markers suggest they follow a unidirectional developmental path, from propositional to textual and expressive uses. The present study tests whether children acquire the propositional (literal) before the expressive (pragmatic) functions of two adversative discourse markers in French and English, which have similar core meanings and pragmatic functions. Our results partially confirm the propositional-first hypothesis but semantics and pragmatics appear to work together, rather than first one then the other, at least in this case, and this runs (...) counter to both diachronic theories and usage-based accounts of L1 acquisition. 88 occurrences of en fait and 174 of actually were extracted from the CHILDES database, and coded for two functions (adversative and elaborative) and three domains (propositional, textual, expressive). The results suggest that the pragmatic functions of actually are used by children as young as two years old, but the same is not true of en fait, which is almost exclusively propositional in the early years. By contrast, before age 5, French children start to use en fait for textual and elaborative functions to a greater extent than actually. The role of syntactic position and parental input are discussed. (shrink)

No single theory so far proposed gives a wholly satisfactory account of the origin and maintenance of bird-song dialects. This failure is the consequence of a weak comparative literature that precludes careful comparisons among species or studies, and of the complexity of the issues involved. Complexity arises because dialects seem to bear upon a wide range of features in the life history of bird species. We give an account of the principal issues in bird-song dialects: evolution of vocal learning, experimental (...) findings on song ontogeny, dialect descriptions, female and male reactions to differences in dialect, and population genetics and dispersal.We present a synthetic theory of the origin and maintenance of song dialects, one that accommodates most of the different systems reported in the literature. The few data available suggest that large, regional dialect populations are genetically differentiated; this pattern is correlated with reduced dispersal between dialects, assortative mating by females, and male-male exclusion. At the same time, “subdialects” may be formed within regional dialects. Subdialect clusters are usually small and may represent vocal mimicry among a few adjacent territorial males. The relative importance of genetic and social adaptation may contribute to the emergence of subdialects; their distinctiveness may be correlated with the degree of polygyny, for example. Thus, subdialect formation is linked to one theory of the evolution of repertoire size, but data are too fragmentary to examine this idea critically. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider the main features of the philosophy of linguistics proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, which emerges from the criticisms directed at what in A Thousand Plateaus they call ‘postulates of linguistics’. The paper focuses on the transition from the Saussurean concept of system and from the connected notion of structure to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machine. More precisely, the purpose of the paper lies, on the one hand, in showing in which sense Deleuze and Guattari (...) claim that language is not a ‘structure’ but a ‘machine’ and why, accordingly, they maintain that the mentioned ‘postulates of linguistics’ must be refused; on the other hand, the paper represents an attempt at placing Deleuze and Guattari's position in the context of contemporary linguistics. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether the gender and/or age of interviewees in dyadic interviews influences frequency of speech interruption of young female interviewers. Forty female students at King Faisal University (KFU) and forty interviewees participated in the study. The author compared the number of interruptions per ten minutes of conversation made by interviewees belonging to four categories: young females, young males, older females, and older males. The author hypothesized that older male interviewees interrupt young female interviewers more than younger male and (...) female interviewees. Additionally, the author hypothesized that older female interviewees interrupt young female interviewers more than young female interviewees. The results did not support the hypothesis that males interrupt females more often. Female participants made significantly more interruptions than male participants. The data do not support the hypothesis that older interviewees interrupt their interviewers more frequently than younger interviewees. (shrink)

According to a “selective” (as opposed to “instructive”) model of human language capacity, people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity (the “poverty of the stimulus”) is bridged by genetically provided information. Hence any hypothesis about the linguistic genotype (or “Universal Grammar,” UG) has consequences for what experience is needed and what form people's mature capacities (or “grammars”) will take. This BBS target article discusses the “trigger experience,” that is, the experience that actually (...) affects a child's linguistic development. It is argued that this must be a subset of a child's total linguistic experience and hence that much of what a child hears has no consequence for the form of the eventual grammar. UG filters experience and provides an upper bound on what constitutes the triggering experience. This filtering effect can often be seen in the way linguistic capacity can change between generations. Children only need access to robust structures of minimal (“degree-0”) complexity. Everything can be learned from simple, unembedded “domains” (a grammatical concept involved in defining an expression's logical form). Children do not need access to more complex structures. (shrink)

Since 1970-ties in the theory of syntax of natural language quite a number of competing, incommensurable theoretic frameworks have emerged. Today the lack of a leading paradigm and kaleidoscope of perspectives deprives our general understanding of syntax and its relation to semantics and pragmatics. The present book is an attempt to reestablish the most fundamental ideas and intuitions of syntactic well-formedness within a new general account. The account is not supposed to compete with any of today’s syntactic frameworks, but to (...) provide a deeper understanding of why these frameworks succeed or fail when they do and to show a new way for cooperation between logicians and linguists which may lead in future to a unified, yet more specific account. (shrink)