How Do We Bend the Truth? The Linguistics of Propaganda and Censorship
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มิ.ย. 2024
- How do we try influencing what other people think about the world? What techniques get used for bending the truth? In this week's episode, we take a look at some of the linguistics around propaganda and censorship: what people can try beyond just outright lying, how using conversational rules can get you to think things that aren't said, and how we can use bias to influence people's views.
This is Topic #91!
This week's tag language: Mongolian!
Last episode:
A Whole New World: The Semantics of Modality - • Can We Define "Must"? ...
Other of our sociolinguistics videos:
Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Languages vs. Dialects - • Sociolinguistics and D...
When Tongues Collide: Pidgins and Creoles - • Pidgins and Creoles
Watch What You Say: Taboo and Euphemisms - • What Makes Bad Words B...
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Swedish joke: One day the captain wrote in the log "today the helmsman was drunk." The next day the helmsman wrote in the log "today the captain was sober."
HA!
Yeah, that's a pretty good one. Very good use of the pragmatics there. ^_^
The Ling Space
It's from a Swedish book called "how to trick people without lying."
I'm here for all the Hunger Games references lol
Finally! I was waiting for that for a long time! Thank you!
It would be amazing if you were to include a short list of books or articles in the description which would provide in-depth information on the topics discussed in video. Great vid btw.
Great channel. I really enjoyed this video. I'm so glad that my daughter and I wandered into your bookstore last week!
This is one of the best channels on TH-cam
LORD LIEBERMAN HATH BLESSED US WITH ANOTHER VIDEO!! HALLOWED BE HIS PROPER NOUN
Haha, thanks so much! I will keep an eye on my proper noun for increased hallowing. ^_^
This video is great, Modi isn't drunk!
The distinctions you make from the 8:30 mark aren't as clear as you make them seem. Our biggest public forums in the modern age are corporate-owned sites like Facebook and Twitter and, if those companies choose "not to grant a podium" to some idea, I think that can meaningfully be described as an attempt at censorship on the part of the owners.
And "someone who thinks that that idea is objectionable, and speaks out against it" is an umbrella that covers both "arguing against an idea" and "demanding that an idea be silenced". And does it matter whether the people that latter group are making their demands to are a group that count as censors when they censor an idea or whether they're a group that only count as "not granting a podium"?
Okay, the way I phrased that was a bit unreasonable and biased towards one side, but my point is that the cyberpunk dystopia that is the year 2017 blurs some lines on the nature of censorship.
Have you written any books on this? I would love a relatively short concise book on propaganda and psychology of linguistics.
Hi, dear TheLingSpace! Could you please clarify if I can claim that the word "today" from "John isn't drunk today" has the wrong presupposition? Like "today, unlike all other days". Thank you in advance for your answer!
So, I had a question that doesn't really relate to this video at all, but which I still wanted to get your voice on anyway...
So, you know Lojban, right? That weird constructed language made to try and get rid of as much syntactic ambiguity as possible?
One of the more interesting things about Lojban is its class of words called "terminators", little particles whose job it is to terminate various internal clauses and get back to adding stuff to the main clause.
Let me give you an example. Consider this sentence:
"The police arrested the man who stole my wallet in Washington."
Now, let me ask you this: What happened in Washington? The stealing, or the arresting? Here, it's not certain. It could be either one of those. However, in Lojban, we can say either one of these two sentences, where the presence or absence of the terminator for relative clauses "ku'o" is used to direct the adpositional phrase "bu'u la .ŭácintyn." (in Washington) to be part of the relative clause or the clause it contains:
leĭ pulji pu flakavbu le nanmu poĭ puzu zerle'a le mi dinra'e bu'u la .ŭácintyn.
the police (past) arrest the man who (distant past) steal the me wallet at that-named Washington
The police arrested the man, The man stole my wallet in Washington
leĭ pulji pu flakavbu le nanmu poĭ puzu zerle'a le mi dinra'e *ku'o* bu'u la .ŭácintyn.
the police (past) arrest the man who (distant past) steal the me wallet (terminator) at that-named Washington
The police arrested the man in Washington, The man stole my wallet
So, my question was... Does anything like this exist in any natlangs that you know of? Like, is there any normal, non-designed in the world that has some way of resolving the ambiguity that exists in that first English sentence? If so, what is it? The use of a particle like ku'o, or something else?
Hello, past self! I'm you from six days into the future, with a bit of knowledge I just learned that kind of pertains to this!
So there's this thing in some languages called "resumptive pronouns". You already kind of know what those do because you're me, but I think that in a few (but not all) cases, these resumptive pronouns behave a lot like Lojban's terminators. Take a look at this pair of sentences, and see how the resumptive pronoun "she" matches up pretty nicely with the terminator-ish thingy "cu":
This is the girl that, whenever it rains, she cries.
ti du le nixli poi ca-ro-nu zo'e carvi cu klaku
Yeah - In English, you can use topicalization to make explicit what clause an adverb or adpositional phrase modifies, though I'm not sure if this works 100% of the time. It'd be cool to be able to forward this question to an actual accomplished linguist like Bernard Comrie. I think what I'm looking for is sort of like a clusivity distinction, where what i'm looking for is like this thing's version of languages that have different words for 'we' based on whether or not 'you' are a part of it, versus languages like English in which the default form is ambiguous.
I'm guessing you don't actually speak Lojban, though, given your description of the terminator «ku'o» as a "relative pronoun / circumposition". I do want to point out that in this conlang, the word I translated as 'which', «poĭ», isn't really a relative pronoun, but instead a relativizer, a particle used to begin a relative clause. Lojban's relative pronoun is «ke'a», which is absent in both sentences due to pro-dropping.
Although, the description of «ku'o» as the latter part of a circumposition of which «poĭ» is the former part... Hm. I'd never really heard that analysis before. In Lojban grammar, the use of a relativizer like «poĭ», «noĭ» or «voĭ» is always required with relative clauses, although the terminator «ku'o» is usually optional to use, and only needed when it'd be ambiguous what an adpositional phrase is modifying. Like, as for my first sentence - «leĭ pulji pu flakavbu le nanmu poĭ puzu zerle'a le mi dinra'e bu'u la .ŭácintyn.», the one where the stealing is what happens in Washington, I could also say «leĭ pulji pu flakavbu le nanmu poĭ puzu zerle'a le mi dinra'e bu'u la .ŭácintyn. ku'o», putting the terminator at the end. I _could_ say that, but I don't, because that's just redundant - The relative clause terminates itself by default at the end of a sentence.
Although, many computerized parsers of Lojban actually do allege that «ku'o» really is a part of every relative clause in the language, using a grammar where it is instead described as "elided" - Left out optionally in certain positions, like at the end of a sentence or before a verb in the containing clause. It's a bit like contractions in English, where "I am Alexolas" and "I'm Alexolas" both mean exactly the same thing; it's just that one of them is made a bit shorter due to grammar stuff.
Oh yeah! I'd heard a bit about French's circumpositional negatives. I suppose, then, that these "terminators" _could_ show up in natlangs, albeit extremely rarely. It'd have to depend on a *lot* of uncommon features piling up on each other, mainly 1) the use of a circumpositional relativizer, and 2) that the part of that relativizer which is not adjacent to the head, if elidible, is only so in positions where it coincidentally just happens to never cause ambiguity. (This might even mean that it could be mandatory even in some positions where there is no problem!)
I guess I'll also point out that Lojban has more terminators than just ku'o. Subordinate clauses use the word "keĭ" to terminate, and certain adverbial subordinations use "gi". There's also "vaŭ", which is a sort of general-purpose terminator that's used more rarely than these other ones because reasons.
Hmm... Do you know how those French and Breton circumpositions - "pas" and "ket" actually came about, where they came from? Perhaps this could provide a clue to how these terminators could develop. Maybe they'd be derived from resumptive pronouns like I was speaking of earlier?
Nicolas GLEMOT nicte co'o! .i a'o refkansa ca da! / good night! i hope to see you again sometime!
"les mots sont source de malentendus" (words are the source of misunderstandings), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
At one point you mentioned something off-hand, like, (paraphrasing) "these generalizations are designed to keep us alive, but don't work very well when it comes to humans". Can you expand on this assertion?
The only studies I've come across that attempted objectively measuring the quality of stereotypes seem to support that they're generally working as intended when it comes to humans as well - that is, stereotypes make generally useful predictions about people that are right more than they're wrong.
It seems to me, at least, a bit questionable to flat-out assert that natural selection has not equipped us with the machinery to effectively deal with other humans, as well.
At the 2-3 minute time you must be talking Bout Congress
Neat, I hadn't really connected the Fundamental Attribution Error and some of the other concepts to propaganda before, but the connection makes sense. For those who value free speech, the answer to many of these approaches is "more speech."
This may be covered in another video already, but does linguistics have much to say about adversarial speech, either for how participants affect each other or the effects on an audience?
I loved all the Hunger Games parallels 😂
If one wants to see how the truth is not just bent but totally mangled one could watch say a few flat earth videos (and the like) in that these might add some additional ways of doing that such as capitalizing on people's ignorance and confounding how say a lawyer might employ legalese with how a scientist might try to simplify things to make them a bit easier for the laymen to understand.
Shouldn't you just say that that person doesn't drink?
Lying like an Aes Sedai. Always fun
Google: TH-cam-:- Adam Atiyeh
I'm sorry, but some people do make bad financial decisions and exhibit behaviors that keep them poor. I had a few in my family.