- Keith Chen's TED talk or his widely-discussed paper on future vs. weak tense
referents and future-oriented behaviors
- Lera Boroditsky's video, which briefly talks about
languages that differ in orienting and counting words, or
one of these
very widely cited papers (1000+)
of hers on conceptions of time. (Here's her collaborator,
Daniel Casasanto, giving an interesting talk
on how we might link valence, or general feeling, to
gestures we make with our hands and through vocal pitch.
It's particularly interesting to watch the ASL interpreter
work with his ideas in this context.)Â
- Steven Pinker's TED talk on this subject
- As Russians, we might be specifically interested in the
debate around color naming, specifically blue and green, which we distinguish
in a 'unique' way
- Here are two studies (one long,
one short)
on how grammatical gender concepts might 'leak' into other
ideas about gender and objects
- There's also the issue of dialect, which is brought up
in the debate around things like African-American English
(or "ebonics"); one of the founders of that field gave a
great talk at Cornell about "dialectical injustice" this
year, a copy of his keynote
at the annual linguistics conference.Â
- On the more political and historical end, we might
decide to talk about the construction of languages (like
Newspeak in 1984) and the censorship of words (like the
loss of "I" in Ayn Rand's Anthem) as a window on
linguistic relativity.Â
- One of the meta-topics we'll be touching on might be
conceptual metaphors - the fact that we use ideas about
moving through space to talk about time (that event is
"coming up", a "pressing deadline", "moving forward") or
use ideas about war to talk about argument (points were
"right on target" or "shot down"), and so on. A great book
that lays out many of these is George Lakoff's Metaphors
We Live By. It's long, but it reads like a
dictionary of metaphors, so you can really just search any
general topic you're interested in and find plenty of
interesting fodder for discussion. Â
If anybody is interested in any of these subjects in
particular - economic impacts of language choice, time,
colors, gender, dialects, &c. - and wants more
info/sources, they should definitely feel free to e-mail or
message me this weekend.
Thanks and looking forward,