ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 พ.ย. 2024
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Aris M. Clemons' presentation on "A-Political Linguistics Doesn’t Exist, and It Shouldn’t: A Model for a Theory of Political Transparency in Linguistics" at the 2022 ISLE summer school
Abstract
Frequently I am asked about a decision I made in my work on Dominican language practices and racial identity. How can I make the claim that Dominican Spanish is a Black Spanish language when Dominicans of all races have access to and employ the unique features of the dialect in their daily lives? To this question, I respond simply, “it’s a political choice.” In this presentation, I discuss the implications of privileging value-based political research agendas in linguistics and affirm the impossibility of objective scientific linguistic research. Instead, I argue that linguists must cultivate a practice of transparency, noting not only their positionalities (see Lin 2015; Clemons and Lawrence 2020 for reference to these calls) but also in their political motivations. In this way, decisions about research questions, frames, and interpretations become clearer. I begin by presenting a brief review of Black language scholarship which exemplifies political transparency in linguistic research over the past fifty years. Through the mapping of these examples, I develop a model for political transparency in linguistics that resists formerly constructed categorizations of linguistics as either theoretical or social. Moreover, I point to the ways that these studies insist on a conceptualization of language that is intimately tied to the body (Bucholtz and Hall 2016), not only of those being researched but of the researchers themselves. In doing so, I argue for a model of language analysis grounded in a Black feminist framework that privileges people’s ability to define themselves through their own cultural and linguistic practices, self-determination; and that requires political transparency as linguistic praxis. Finally, I evidence the benefits of this practice through an example of a research project, which applied African American English (AAE) research traditions to an exploration of Dominican language practices. In this project, I argued for a Diasporic Black Community of Practice approach to the study of Caribbean Spanish, ultimately destabilizing the generative and variationist approaches which have dominated the study of Caribbean Spanish in linguistic traditions (Lipski 1993, 2018).
Readings
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. 2016. ‘Embodied sociolinguistics’. In N. Coupland (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 173-197.
Clemons, A. and Lawrence, A. 2020. ‘Beyond position statements on race: Fostering an ethos of antiracist scholarship in linguistic research (Response to Charity Hudley et al.)’. Language 96: e254-e267.
Lin, A.M.Y. 2015. ‘Researcher positionality’. In F.M. Hult and D. Cassels Johnson (ed.) Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge. 21-32.
Lipski, J.M. 1993. On the Non-Creole Basis for Afro-Caribbean Spanish. digitalreposit...\_research/18
Lipski, J.M. 2018. ‘Languages in contact: Pidginization and creolization, Spanish in the Caribbean’. In E. Núñez-Méndez (ed.) Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact. London: Routledge. 95-118.
