Language Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Language is a very important topic in its own right (Crystal 1987) and in terms of philosophical debates in the social sciences (Rorty 1967), yet, surprisingly, many sociologists pay scant attention to language. Recently there has been a reexamination of the work of outstanding linguists and logicians. The important debates between those who identify with Enlightenment modernism and those who adhere to postmodernism have forced many social scientists to reexamine long-held assumptions. Critical approaches to the study of gender, race, and class have often involved a rethinking of basic linguistic categories by scholars such as Chomsky, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Bauman, Pinker, and many others. The study of language is a window to all of the social sciences, especially as cutting-edge theory is shaping up in the early twenty-first century. For many, there has been a philosophical shift from Cartesian ”subject-centered reason and rational action, to Fichtean ”communicative social action and symbolic interaction. Many writers have discussed the ”linguistic turn in contemporary thought, a paradigm shift that may have started with ”ordinary language philosophy and other trends in the 1960s, or even earlier. Modernist, structuralist epistemologies stressing the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy have been confronted by postmodernist, poststructuralist epistemologies which stress the “habitus” and the “lifeworld.”

An examination of the anthropological and sociological aspects of language includes the study of the creation of artificial languages with simplified grammars (e.g., Esperanto). Language affects social structures and social structures, in turn, affect language. What interest the social scientist are the complex patterns that emerge from the human use of language. This leads to ethnolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. In sociology the focus is on sociolinguistics.

Various poststructuralist scholars have indicated that the Dilthey-Weber use of Verstehen – and ”romantic hermeneutics in general – may still be too individualistic and may neglect the importance of the sociolinguistic ”field, the conscious and unconscious coordination of a group due to its shared language. Hence, we move from the individual scholar to the social actor and then to the ”bundle of habits.

In the discipline of linguistics the field of ”pragmatics concerns the ways in which language usage is linked to contextual background features. This has a recognized overlap with sociological ethno-methodology. How do people ”accomplish talk”? Knowledge of the sociocultural context and the social psychological situation can help us, for example, to distinguish between angry and joking behavior. Conversation analysis examines the structure of human dialogues.

The study of ”symbolic interaction by sociologists who call themselves symbolic interactionists is based in part on George Herbert Mead s insight that in order for two or more people to interact they need to have ”significant symbols in common. A significant symbol is a symbol that all participants to the interaction understand fairly clearly in terms of its practical consequences.

Some authors, following clues found in Saussure and Peirce, have argued that there should be a shift from linguistics to a much more generalized approach that is sometimes called semiotics. Peirce (1923) argues that the aspect of reality that is being signified is something ”represented by an interpretive community and not by an isolated individual. The interpretive community always signifies ”the representant through the use of a system of signs. Hence, language is a semiotic system that allows for human and animal communication.

For some, it is not possible to study anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, or psycholinguistics without evoking all aspects of human communication (anthroposemiotics). The argument is also frequently extended to include communication among other animals. Thus, the study of ”the language of bees is a study in animal communication (zoo-semiotics). The underlying premise is that there is a high degree of continuity between other animals and the human animal in the way in which we communicate.

There are many kinds of signs that are important to human languages, but perhaps the most important are ”symbols such as words and phrases. A set of such symbols, perhaps supplemented by iconic or indexical signs, can constitute a ”text. Any piece of recorded symbolic communication is a kind of text, but when we think of language we think primarily in terms of written language and the formal ”ground of such a language, what Saussure refers to as la langue.

The stronger form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected today, but it is widely recognized that a weaker form of that theory is valid. Complex hypothetical and deductive linguistic theories have been postulated by many thinkers, including those who have emphasized the importance of ”semiotics. Writers such as A. J. Greimas have utilized insights from thinkers like Saussure, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Dumezil, Barthes, Lacan, Propp, and Jakobson to develop arguments concerning the relationship between language and communicative symbols in general. Such ”structural views tend to postulate the existence of a narrated universe of ”deep semantic structures that are reflected in the underlying grammar of all human languages.

Bibliography:

Crystal, D. (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Peirce, C. S. (1923) Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays. Harcourt Brace, New York.
Rorty, R. (ed.) (1967) The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.