HCC class lecture 11 comments John Canny 2/28/05

Administrivia I’m travelling on Weds. Class as usual with one of you as moderator. Topic is LSA.

Bakhtin Mikhail Bakhtin worked in the early-to-mid 20 th century, but developed many ideas that are very modern. Today he is one of the most popular literary theorists. He initiated study of language in context, “the utterance” which was very modern for its time. In Saussure’s terminology, he was the first to seriously study “parole” rather than “langue”.

Bakhtin Bakhtin’s emphasis on utterance foreshadowed the evolution of semiotics in the late 20 th century. The Structuralists took this idea part-way: meaning is determined by the language and certain Diachronic “structures” (e.g. social relationships). Since words usually stand for concepts rather than concrete objects in the world, language strongly shapes thought. But still, the primary structuralist role for signs is to “stand for” concepts or things at some level: “modality”.

The utterance Bakhtin emphasized the uniqueness of meaning of the utterance from an individual speaker in a specific context. He proposed a subject called “trans-linguistics” intended to study all language-related phenomena that occur in other disciplines. It includes linguistics, literary theory, learning science, anthropology, sociology, etc. We are using the term “the linguistic approach” to invoke this idea.

Multi-vocality There are always several voices in an utterance: at least the listeners and the hearers. This applies to verbal utterances and also to texts. We understand language by supplying “answering words” to what we hear.

Dialogicality Bakhtin’s approach is also called “dialogical” because the most universal form of multi-vocality is human dialogue. Other communication (including written) resembles dialogue since there is always at least a listener and hearer. Speakers orient their dialogue to the listener, so the listener shapes the words that are spoken as well as their meaning.

Social Languages Spoken by particular social groups with National groups. Not a hard or syntactic category, but a representation of typical or conventional speech. A mirror of social groups (Vygotsky’s cultural categories) on the inter-personal plane. i.e. you can learn about an individual’s likely membership in a social stratum from their language.

Speech Genres Conventions for appropriate speech in particular contexts. We “invoke” such genres whenever we speak. i.e. There are conventions for “university lecture speech,” parent-child speech etc.

Bakhtin’s units of analysis Bakhtin’s ideas, and those of the post-structuralists generally, have been regarded as “outside the realm of scientific analysis” Utterances, and “national languages” or “genres” have traditionally been very difficult to study because of size and complexity. But these days we can literally “capture” and analyze them in many ways.

Discussion Topics T1: Discuss what “voice,” “national language,” “genre” etc., might mean constructively. i.e. how could you encode them in a form that you might discover computationally.