scholarly journals Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-59
Author(s):  
Monika Chao ◽  
Julia R. S. Bursten
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Feminist Epistemology ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Sexist Attitudes ◽  
Tone Of Voice ◽  
And Linguistics

AbstractVocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices.

Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
International Language ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Basic English ◽  
And Linguistics

This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.

The Language of Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
New Research ◽  
Fictional Names ◽  
Philosophy Of Fiction ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
Fictional Story ◽  
Fictional Truth

The Language of Fiction brings together new research on fiction from philosophy and linguistics. Fiction is a topic that has long been studied in philosophy. Yet recently there has been a surge of work on fictional discourse in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. There has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. The Language of Fiction contains fourteen essays by leading scholars in both fields, as well as a substantial Introduction by the editors. The collection is organized in three parts, each with their own introduction. Part I, “Truth, reference, and imagination”, offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, “Storytelling”, deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, “Perspective shift”, zooms in on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, viz. the way we get access to the fictional characters’ inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see.

The curse of the perceptual: a case from kinaesthesia

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Kolaiti
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Representations ◽  
And Linguistics

AbstractDebate in philosophy of language and linguistics has focused on conceptual representations/propositional thought; as a result there has been little discussion on the effability of

Paul Grice

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Benton
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Logical Paradoxes ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Paul Grice ◽  
British Philosopher

Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913–d. 1988) was a British philosopher and linguist, and one of the pivotal figures in philosophy during the 20th century. He wrote in many areas of philosophy, including the metaphysics of personal identity, logical paradoxes, the analytic/synthetic distinction, the philosophy of perception, philosophical psychology, and ethics. He also wrote on historical figures such as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. But his most significant contributions came in philosophy of language and mind, on meaning, intention, presupposition, conversation, and the theory of communication. Grice argued for an intention-based theory of meaning, and he was the first to illustrate the distinction between what came to be called semantic and pragmatic meaning, that is, between what a speaker’s utterance (or its utterance “type”) means in the abstract, and what else a speaker can mean by uttering it in a particular context. Grice highlighted this by an appeal to his framework of the Cooperative Principle and its Conversational Maxims, which are plausibly assumed by conversational participants and provide mechanisms for the ways in which speakers can “conversationally implicate” something beyond the literal meaning of what they say, and for how hearers can recover those “implicatures.’” Grice’s enduring influence on these topics helped found the burgeoning discipline in philosophy of language and linguistics now known as “pragmatics” (compare the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article on “Pragmatics”).

Pragmatics

Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Communicative Interaction ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Circular Argument ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
Sense And Reference

Pragmatics is a branch of the philosophy of language as well as a field of linguistics. Pragmatics is to be distinguished from pragmatism, which is a doctrine concerning the nature of truth and knowledge. Whereas proponents of pragmatism are pragmatists, students of pragmatics are pragmaticists. Imagine a communicative interaction among two or more parties. Pragmaticists generally study that part of what is communicated that is left over after the conventionally determined, literal meaning of any words used has been subtracted out. (This is in contrast to what remains after the conventionally permitted, literal meaning has been subtracted out—see The Pragmatic Determination of What is Said) In part because pragmatics falls within the ambit of linguistics, it has an empirical, indeed an experimental dimension. Topics comprising pragmatics include speech acts (a special case of which are performatives), implicature, indexicals, presupposition, speaker meaning, and the pragmatic determination of what is said. A topic that has recently received intensive discussion and is of obvious importance to pragmatics is the very delineation of semantics from pragmatics. Other topics that have received less extensive scrutiny include expression and expressiveness and the relation of illocutionary force to semantic content and grammatical mood. In addition to the topics comprising the field, the value of pragmatics as an explanatory enterprise may be gauged by its ability to illuminate familiar communicative phenomena: among these are metaphor, irony, the significance of epithets and other “charged” language, the distinction between lying to and misleading an audience, facial expression, communicative properties of intonation, and so-called pragmatic paradoxes. Theoretical discussions of pornography have also been influenced by pragmatics. Aside from linguistics, logical theory also has a stake in pragmatics insofar as the notion of good reasoning cannot be captured simply with the notion of soundness. (A circular argument, for instance, can be sound.) Further, on the strength of certain ways of drawing the pragmatics/semantics boundary, some phenomena traditionally in the purview of semantics have been construed as pragmatic instead: among these are Frege’s distinction between sense and reference and the phenomenon of non-referring proper names. Certain semantic strategies, then, have a stake in pragmatics.

scholarly journals The application of Feminist Standpoint Theory in social research

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-318
Author(s):  
María Silvestre Cabrera ◽  
María López Belloso ◽  
Raquel Royo Prieto
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Standpoint Theory ◽  
Feminist Epistemology ◽  
Feminist Standpoint Theory ◽  
Social Construction Of Reality ◽  
Feminist Standpoint ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Situated Perspective

This article assumes a priori that feminist epistemology must necessarily imply the definition and application of a methodology that is capable of analysing knowledge from a situated perspective, making visible the restrictions of gender, class, ethnicity, and in summary, of the social location.  Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST) set out by authors such as Sandra Harding, calls on those who have not had access to power and areas of decision-making to participate in the construction of knowledge and in the social construction of reality. In this article, we will claim for a need of a sociological investigation based on FST and provide some examples and evidence of the knowledge generated by women's voices building on the analysis of 10 doctoral theses. The methodology used is based on the analysis of the topics chosen by the thesis, the formulation of its objectives and the bibliography used. Likewise, we have developed a so-called “Harding test” grounded on her postulates, which has allowed us to assess the doctoral theses analysed and to reflect about the empirical contributions of the research, the feminist commitment and what the subject / object relationship should be in feminist epistemology.

Philosophy of Language

2020 ◽  
pp. 359-383
Author(s):  
Hanne Appelqvist
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Philosophy Of Music ◽  
Language And Music

This chapter explores connections between the philosophy of language and the philosophy of music, starting from questions of meaning and understanding that the two fields arguably share. It considers how such notions as reference, representation, expression, communication, logic, rules, and grammar have been used to explain the semantic content of music. Tracing the development of the comparison between language and music from the linguistic phase of analytic philosophy to its subsequent decline and the emergence of metaphysics and naturalism as the dominant explanatory frameworks, the chapter provides a diagnosis of the reasons behind the current misgivings about the comparison. It closes by arguing, pace many contemporary accounts of musical meaning, that the comparison between language and music has not been exhausted as a source of philosophical illumination.

Pretense and Presupposition

Aboutness ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
First Century ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Potential Infinity ◽  
Good Guide ◽  
Twenty First Century

A great puzzle of twentieth-century philosophy of language was, how are finite beings able to understand a potential infinity of sentences? The answer is supposed to be that understanding is recursive: infinitely many sentences can be constructed out of finitely many words combined according to finitely many rules; we understand a sentence by understanding the words in it and knowing the relevant rules. A great puzzle of twenty-first-century philosophy of language is shaping up to be this: how do we reconcile the solution to the previous puzzle with what sentences actually strike us as saying? It's a puzzle because S's compositionally determined meaning is not always a very good guide to what S intuitively says, or to its contribution to what is said by sentences in which S is embedded. This chapter focuses on the more radical case where a sentence says something its meaning positively disallows, such as the case where a sentence's real content is not a possible semantic content.

The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Argumentation Theory ◽  
Linguistic Relativity ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Linguistics

The philosophy of language is central to the concerns of those working across semantics, pragmatics and cognition, as well as the philosophy of mind and ideas. Bringing together an international team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics. Chapters are grouped into thematic areas and cover a wide range of topics, from key philosophical notions, such as meaning, truth, reference, names and propositions, to characteristics of the most recent research in the field, including logicality of language, vagueness in natural language, value judgments, slurs, deception, proximization in discourse, argumentation theory and linguistic relativity. It also includes chapters that explore selected linguistic theories and their philosophical implications, providing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Showcasing the cutting-edge in research in the field, this book is essential reading for philosophers interested in language and linguistics, and linguists interested in philosophical analyses.

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