Governmentality and Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Urla

This article reviews how the analytics of governmentality have been taken up by scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. It explores the distinctive logics of “linguistic governmentality” understood as techniques and forms of expertise that seek to govern, guide, and shape (rather than force) linguistic conduct and subjectivity at the level of the population or the individual. Governmentality brings new perspectives to the study of language ideologies and practices informing modernist and neoliberal language planning and policies, the technologies of knowledge they generate, and the contestations that surround them. Recent work in this vein is deepening our understanding of “language”—understood as an array of verbal and nonverbal communicative practices—as a medium through which neoliberal governmentality is exercised. The article concludes by considering how a critical sociolinguistics of governmentality can address some shortcomings in the study of governmentality and advance the study of language, power, and inequality.

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Benson

Those who have advocated social approaches to applied linguistics have often been critical of the individualism of second language acquisition (SLA) research. This paper identifies the emergence of a more balanced view of the social and individual in recent work. Adopting Berger's (1972) metaphor of ‘ways of seeing’, it offers a history of applied linguistics based on three eras: the era of ‘the invisible learner’, the era of ‘learner-centredness’, and the era of ‘person-centredness’, which we may now be entering. It suggests dominant research methodologies have led to the particular ways of seeing language learners that are characteristic of each of the three eras. In spite of the critique of individualism, the preference for individual case studies in social approaches is leading to a new theoretical focus on the individual that may be best captured by the term ‘person-centredness’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (27) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Ana María Relaño Pastor

This special issue addresses the organization of teaching and learning in a variety of multilingual schooling contexts from different critical ethnographic perspectives (i.e.: critical sociolinguistic ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and language socialization). By analyzing a range of educational settings in Spain, the U.S., the U.K., Argentina, and Guatemala, the articles establish a dialogue with different ethnographically-oriented studies to understand the relationship between situated communicative practices, language policies, language ideologies, dominant discourses about bi-multilingualism, and wider social, cultural and economic processes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Karoline Gritzner

AbstractThis article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-113
Author(s):  
Farrah Neumann ◽  
Matthew Kanwit

AbstractSince many linguistic structures are variable (i. e. conveyed by multiple forms), building a second-language grammar critically involves developing sociolinguistic competence (Canale and Swain. 1980. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1(1). 1–47), including knowledge of contexts in which to use one form over another (Bayley and Langman. 2004. Variation in the group and the individual: Evidence from second language acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 42(4). 303–318). Consequently, researchers interested in such competence have increasingly analyzed the study-abroad context to gauge learners’ ability to approximate local norms following a stay abroad, due to the quality and quantity of input to which learners may gain access (Lafford. 2006. The effects of study abroad vs. classroom contexts on Spanish SLA: Old assumptions, new insights and future research directions. In Carol Klee & Timothy Face (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 7th conference on the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as first and second languages, 1–25. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project). Nevertheless, the present study is the first to examine native or learner variation between imperative (e. g. ven ‘come’) and optative Spanish commands (e. g. que vengas ‘come’). We first performed a corpus analysis to determine the linguistic factors to manipulate in a contextualized task, which elicited commands from learners before and after four weeks abroad in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Their overall rates of selection and predictive factors were compared to local native speakers (NSs) and a control group of at-home learners.Results revealed that the abroad learners more closely approached NS rates of selection following the stay abroad. Nonetheless, for both learner groups conditioning by independent variables only partially approximated the NS system, which was more complex than previously suggested.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wolfgram

AbstractThis article documents the practices of pharmaceutical creativity in Ayurveda, focusing in particular on how practitioners appropriate multiple sources to innovate medical knowledge. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology on the social circulation of discourse—a process calledentextualization—I describe how the ways in which Ayurveda practitioners innovate medical knowledge confounds the dichotomous logic of intellectual property (IP) rights discourse, which opposes traditional collective knowledge and modern individual innovation. While it is clear that these categories do not comprehend the complex nature of creativity in Ayurveda, I also use the concept of entextualization to describe how recent historical shifts in the circulation of discourse have caused a partial entailment of this opposition between the individual and the collectivity. Ultimately, I argue that the method exemplified in this article of tracking the social circulation of medical discourse highlights both the empirical complexity of so-called traditional creativity, and the politics of imposing the categories of IP rights discourse upon that creativity, situated as it often is, at the margins of the global economy.


1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka

AbstractIn his most recent work, John Rawls argues that political theory must recognize and accomodate the ‘fact of pluralism’, including the fact of religious diversity. He believes that the liberal commitment to individual rights provides the only feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. In the paper, I discuss a second form of tolerance, based on group rights rather than individual rights. Drawing on historical examples, I argue that this is is also a feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. While both models ensure tolerance between groups, only the former tolerates individual dissent within groups. To defend the individual rights model, therefore, liberals must appeal not only to the fact of social pluralism, but also to the value of individual autonomy. This may require abandoning Rawls’s belief that liberalism can and should be defended on purely ‘political’, rather than ‘comprehensive’ grounds.


Blood ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 118 (25) ◽  
pp. 6499-6505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgardo D. Carosella ◽  
Silvia Gregori ◽  
Joel LeMaoult

Abstract Myeloid antigen-presenting cells (APCs), regulatory cells, and the HLA-G molecule are involved in modulating immune responses and promoting tolerance. APCs are known to induce regulatory cells and to express HLA-G as well as 2 of its receptors; regulatory T cells can express and act through HLA-G; and HLA-G has been directly involved in the generation of regulatory cells. Thus, interplay(s) among HLA-G, APCs, and regulatory cells can be easily envisaged. However, despite a large body of evidence on the tolerogenic properties of HLA-G, APCs, and regulatory cells, little is known on how these tolerogenic players cooperate. In this review, we first focus on key aspects of the individual relationships between HLA-G, myeloid APCs, and regulatory cells. In its second part, we highlight recent work that gathers individual effects and demonstrates how intertwined the HLA-G/myeloid APCs/regulatory cell relationship is.


Author(s):  
Trung Minh Nguyen ◽  
Thien Huu Nguyen

The previous work for event extraction has mainly focused on the predictions for event triggers and argument roles, treating entity mentions as being provided by human annotators. This is unrealistic as entity mentions are usually predicted by some existing toolkits whose errors might be propagated to the event trigger and argument role recognition. Few of the recent work has addressed this problem by jointly predicting entity mentions, event triggers and arguments. However, such work is limited to using discrete engineering features to represent contextual information for the individual tasks and their interactions. In this work, we propose a novel model to jointly perform predictions for entity mentions, event triggers and arguments based on the shared hidden representations from deep learning. The experiments demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method, leading to the state-of-the-art performance for event extraction.


1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Birch

The thesis of this paper is that no substantive and impartial debate about the pedagogical value of using Ebonics in the classroom could be held in the United States media because America's prescriptive attitude towards Ebonics does not allow fair and objective consideration of the issue. In presenting this theme I will discuss language ideologies in general and prescription in particular as a common attitude towards language. Prescription with respect to Ebonics usually takes the form of language prejudice. I will conclude with an introduction to one area of language planning, status planning, in which language planners try to improve the status of a dialect or language by selecting a goal, planning the necessary research, and devising a marketing or diffusion plan.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Linn

Summary The major claim of this article is that there is an independent and clearly defined chapter in the development of linguistics, beginning in the 1880s, which represents the birth of modern applied linguistics, and which has been overlooked in linguistic historiography because of the comparative marginalisation of applied linguistics in the literature. This is the Anglo-Scandinavian School, a phrase its members used to describe themselves. Pioneers within phonetics, these linguists applied their phonetic knowledge to a range of ‘real world’ language issues, notably language-teaching reform, orthographic reform, language planning, and the study of the spoken language. As well as presenting the ideas of the Anglo-Scandinavian School and how they were developed, this article interrogates the notion of a school in intellectual history and proposes that it may in fact be more fruitful to view intellectual history in terms of discourse communities.


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