Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in (...) order to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science. © Sanja Bahun, Dušan Radunović and the contributors 2012. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, a small but productive number of scholars have examined the mechanics and implications of the relationship between foreign-born, female domestic workers, and their employers, both in the USA and around the world. Although they have drawn compellingly on ethnographic methods and sociological theory to understand this relationship within the context of a global economy, few scholars have considered its sociolinguistic dimensions and the ways in which the differential of power between employer and employee is maintained (...) through particular linguistic strategies. In this paper, I seek to redress this lacuna by studying household Spanish handbooks, artifacts designed to teach a register of the language composed of formal commands and commonplace lexical items. I perform discourse analysis on three such handbooks published in the USA between 1959 and 2012, highlighting the different ways in which they attempt to facilitate communication between English-speaking employers and their Spanish-speaking employees. Separated by the span of a generation, these handbooks instantiate popular ideologies regarding the Spanish language and its speakers at the time of their publication – ideologies that have remained largely unchanged over the course of 53 years. At the same time, this sequential analysis illustrates the dynamic ways in which domestic relationships have been conceived over time, ensuring their asymmetry through discursive tactics that have become increasingly covert. (shrink)

Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic (...) codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. This 2003 book demonstrates that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, it suggests strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity. (shrink)

Experiential and mediatized, Pentecostal Christianity is one of the most successful cases of contemporary religious globalization. However, it has often grown and expanded transnationally without clear authoritative contours. That is the case in contemporary Ghana, where Pentecostal claims about charismatic empowerment have fed public anxieties concerning the fake and the occult. This article examines how Pentecostalism’s dysfunctional circulation is countered within seminaries, or Bible schools, by specific strategies of pastoral training. First, I revisit recent debates on Protestant language (...) class='Hi'>ideology in the anthropology of Christianity, and stress Pentecostalism’s affinity with notions of flow and saturation of speech by divine presence. Second, I move to data collected in the Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, and investigate this institution’s pedagogical framing of Pentecostalism’s otherwise erratic flow of speech and power according to two normative operations: Biblical figuration and the emic notion of transmission as ‘impartation’. I conclude by stressing how the metapragmatics of figuration and impartation in Anagkazo requires an understanding of religious circulation that exceeds the dominant scholarly focus on religion-as-mediation. (shrink)

Resumen: En este artículo se examinan las principales ideologías lingüísticas que los hablantes bilingües de dos comunidades pewenche construyen en torno al chedungun. Este estudio, de carácter exploratorio, tiene un enfoque cualitativo. Los datos analizados corresponden al discurso de 20 hablantes bilingües de entre 18 y 75 años de edad, pertenecientes a las comunidades de Pitril y Butalelbun del Alto Biobío. En términos generales, los resultados evidencian que el chedungun se concibe como un componente fundamental para la configuración y mantenimiento (...) de la espiritualidad e identidad étnica. Asimismo, se observan ideologías puristas hacia la lengua que propician inseguridad lingüística en los hablantes más jóvenes de Pitril.: This article examines the main linguistic ideologies that the bilingual speakers of two Pewenche communities build around chedungun. This exploratory study has a qualitative approach. The analyzed data correspond to the speech of 20 bilingual speakers between 18 and 75 years old, belonging to the rural communities of Pitril and Butalelbun from Alto Biobío. In general, the results show that chedungun is conceived as the main composing element for the maintenance of ethnic spirituality and identity. Moreover, we have discovered language purist ideologies that foster linguistic insecurity in the youngest speakers of Pitril. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to investigate the discourses, ideologies, and identities of international teaching assistants as they engage in hegemonic diversity discourses concerning inequ...

Given the fact that ‘native’ speakers and linguists both can be considered as experts in language, the specificity of their knowledge of language needs to be described. The reflexive discourses they respectively produce seem to indicate a difference in the perception of temporality and in the capacity of acknowledging ignorance. In this respect, the present paper analyzes two kinds of data: Guidelines produced by linguists acting as experts for language analysis in asylum cases, and elicited interviews collected (...) in the field within an anthropological framework. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine the mission and education of the Korean Orthodox Church in the process of migration and settlement of Koreans in the Primorsky Krai from the 1860s to the 1910s and to discuss the historical background and sociocultural significance of it. This study summarizes the history of Korean maritime migrants in chronological order in the late 19th century. In this study, Russian, Russian-Korean bilingual and Korean translation used by the Russian Orthodox Church were discussed. (...) At the time of the 19th century, the Russian Orthodox Church was the ideological background of the ruling Russian emigration. The Russian orthodox education that Koreans received was the first Western-style education acceptance of Koreans. The Orthodox Church conducted missions and education for Koreans through Russian language education, Korean-Russian bilingual education, and Korean-speaking Korean missions. Koreans accepted sophistication for survival and adjustment in Russia, or spiritual influence, and expressed enthusiasm for education. Russian Orthodox was bilingual, reflecting the dialect used by Koreans in Russia, and standard Korean of Seoul area. Although the educational environment was poor and the political situation was always changing rapidly, the role of the Orthodox Church was great in that it provided opportunities for Koreans to play an active role in the Primorsky Krai by finding out the talents of Koreans through education and by knowing their potentials themselves. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a 1.8 million-word corpus of right-leaning newspaper articles about ‘speak English’ in the years following this historic Census. The analysis reveals the tendency for the press to (...) focus on immigrants – particularly in the contexts of education and health – who are represented with recourse to a series of argumentation strategies, or ‘topoi’. Over the course of this paper, we argue that these topoi are problematic, as they present paradoxes, obscure the role of the Government in ensuring integration, overlook the difficulties of language learning and cultural assimilation, and generally contribute to a broader anti-immigrant UK media narrative which serves to legitimise exclusionary and discriminatory practices against people from minority linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. (shrink)

This article takes the linguistic space of North India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tries to see how a nationalistic linguistic ideology that was shaping up at that time, creating Hindi and Urdu linguistic communities, used gender as a tool to portray and assert a masculinist vision of language and nation. It involved not just censoring certain representations of women and their cultural spaces, but also using the issue of ‘vulgar’ representations as a premise to marginalize (...) certain languages and their literature. The article looks at the colonial ideology that worked as an enforcer for the nationalists to work towards achieving what they felt as a sanitized and moral form of literature and culture. The linguistic ideology that accompanied these revisions was of projecting Hindi (Khari Boli) as a national language while limiting spaces of other languages, such as Braj, Urdu and Bhojpuri, in the region, by criticizing either their use of sexual imagery or by stereotyping them in a gendered way. This article investigates the arguments of nationalist writers and highlights their masculinist and patriarchal ideas in their bid for the new national language. (shrink)

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this article analyzes a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, namely, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which cover (...) the political spectrum from anti-Beijing to pro-Beijing. In total, 856 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ and ‘佔領’ were annotated using the Attitude framework. Analysis shows that their attitudes toward the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not simply reflect the stances of the newspapers, but are strategically selected and designed to legitimize or delegitimize the event. The pattern of attitudes reflects the ideological divergence in Hong Kong society, and at the same time, the news reports also exacerbate the divergence by reinforcing the attitudes of their readers. (shrink)

The settler-colonial and republican principles of early U.S. politics tend to be studied as paradoxical ambitions of American nation-building. This article argues that early republican thought in the United States developed through what I call ‘ideological code-switching’, a vernacular practice that allowed popular actors to strategically vacillate between anti-colonial and neo-colonial discourses as complementary principles of revolutionary change. I illustrate these claims by tracing a genealogy of anti- and neo-colonial thought from the founding of the United States to its transnational (...) emergence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I demonstrate that ideological code-switching first appeared as a rhetorical strategy among the Federalist debates, where Publius argued for the feasibility of expansionist republics via a hemispheric account of American exceptionalism. These appeals to hemispheric unity remained salient into the nineteenth century among groups like the ‘Republicans of ‘Nacogdoches’, a militia comprised of Indigenous, Mestizo, and White actors that mobilized an attack on Spain and founded the Republic of Texas in April of 1813. Drawing on archival research, I turn to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as an example of the way marginalized groups instrumentalized links between anti- and neo-colonial politics to envision their position in the rapidly evolving landscapes of transnational revolution. (shrink)

Language-related right in the legal proceedings is mostly associated with access to interpreting. Literature on the bilingual courtroom primarily centres on the role of interpreters in the intercultural communication. This paper, drawing on discourse analysis of a case study in a Chinese criminal court, investigates the atypical role played by an interpreter when she ceases to be an active participant in the bilingual interaction. It discusses how language ideology underlying the judicial practice could transform the role of (...) the interpreter and convert the bilingual arterial into a monolingual one. Situating the analysis in the wider social and legal context of Chinese criminal justice system, this paper attempts to explain and interpret the judicial behaviour to keep the interpreter silent and the impact on the language rights enjoyed by the minority-language-speaking defendants. (shrink)

Using critical discourse analysis this study analyzes how ideologies and national identities are discursively constructed through editorial and opinion commentaries in two English-language newspapers from China and Japan on an international incident involving the two countries. The first four editorials/opinions on the East China Sea trawler collision incident from the China Daily and Daily Yomiuri are analyzed. Findings show that a variety of discursive strategies are adopted by the newspapers to construct national identity and intergroup relations, including: 1) the (...) discursive categorization of group identity, 2) the discursive re-categorization of intergroup relations, and 3) the discursive re-categorization of intragroup relations. Even though both newspapers are products of globalization, and purport to target international and cosmopolitan audiences, the reporting of the East China Sea incident closely adheres to official narratives and discourses of the respective governments. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the convergence of the positions of Wittgenstein and Althusser. The discussion on the political implications of Wittgenstein?s thought has revolved around the possibility (or impossibility) of taking his ideas as standpoints for a critical view of the social dimension, around its legitimacy, reach and strength. However, translating Wittgenstein?s thoughts into an Althusserian materialistic position leads to an understanding of the critiques within the former?s work that does not hinge on their warranty as a point of view, (...) but to the effects of deconstructing the philosophical discourse which seeks to unify and to arrange hierarchically the evidences (certainties) constitutive of the different language games in which the social is displayed. I will conclude this paper with some remarks on the distinction --borrowed both from Wittgenstein and Althusser-- between philosophy as an ideological-theoretical practice and as a critical-theoretical practice that follows from my analysis. (shrink)

This study critically explores the representation of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes in 15 articles and photographs from local Spanish-language print media with the goal of determining the potential for minoritized semiotic texts to challenge the negative semiotic treatment of Latin@ immigrants in the United States. Following a critical social semiotic approach, the analysis of intersemiotic relationships demonstrates that approximately half of the semiotic texts analyzed communicate an overall transformative message by challenging the negative representations of Latin@s (...) in the mainstream media. The strong presence of transformative ideologies in the verbal and visual modes underscores the potential for Spanish-language media to represent Latin@s as powerful social actors who stand up to negative treatment through activism. Moreover, the contrast of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes may incite the audience to participate in activism that supports Latin@ immigrants in the United States. (shrink)

Evaluative Semantics proposes a strongly postmodernist theory of cognition, ideology and discourse in which the structure and internal consistency of ideology resemble those of evaluative knowledge of the mind. The strength of this book is that it goes beyond purely theoretical claims to propose an original connectionist model of evaluative interpretation. Malrieu's new semantics makes a unique contribution to the literature of cognitive science, linguistics, and discourse analysis.

In this book, the author presents an ontological discussion of whether our comprehension of what constitutes language use and language, should be based on what the speakers say or think, they do. T...

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client''s view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness (...) is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...) types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

Increasingly, research in women's health and healthcare foregrounds women's experience. Despite the contribution that explorations of women's ‘lived life’ makes to our understandings, the concern of these feminist authors is the absence of in‐depth analysis of the complexity of experience and the contexts in which women's experiences of health are constituted. In this paper, authors extend current understandings of the lived life by complicating notions of knowledge, experience, language and ideologies. These ideas challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions that underlie current women's (...) healthcare practices, disrupting the reinscription of patriarchal ideologies and generating new possibilities for nursing practice. (shrink)