Approaches to Language
Chair: Edward Taylor
“Identity and the Mitigation of Disagreement and Criticism” by Lucie Riou
In politeness studies, the expression of one’s contradictory opinion is usually considered as a Face Threatening Act, and it has been said to somehow endanger the interpersonal relationship or even the outcome of a conversation (Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). Although we recognise that disagreement should not be seen exclusively as a negative and destructive event (Locher, 2004; Sifianou, 2012), it has been usually defined from a conflict perspective, to be avoided or mitigated if produced, in order to preserve the faces of both speaker and hearer (Sifianou, 2012).
This paper explores how, in a French conversation among peers, criticism and disagreement are expressed and dealt with by the interactants, by means of various mitigating devices. Our research questions are as follows:
- To what extent do mitigating strategies vary in conversations according to speakers and / or topics?
- Do the role and status of the speakers have an impact on the use of mitigating strategies?
These questions will be addressed by the qualitative analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring French conversations of groups of friends. The objective is therefore to explore how the ways in which such potentially conflictual Speech Acts are expressed linguistically and dealt with is related to the topic and the identity of the participants.
"Conflictive Metaphors: The ups and downs of ineffability" by Mike Rose-Steel
This paper sets out some of the techniques of metaphor employed to communicate conceptions of the ineffable in negative theology, taking as its base text the late-antiquity pseudo-Dionysian corpus, and then uses these techniques to explore similar applications and effects in poetry, drawing on Kai Miller’s ‘Church Women’ series and other contemporary poetry.
Of particular interest is the way that conflicting metaphors of direction are employed in both contexts, most often the ascent towards the divine paired with a descent into ignorance, and the necessary failure or incompleteness of both moves. This creates an oscillating tension in understanding the text, which is shown to be both a feature of the attempt to ‘express the inexpressible’ and productive for a view of poetry as something to be ‘inhabited’.
The result will be draw useful parallels between poetic and theological modes of expression, and the ‘limitations’ with which they struggle and through which they create. The paper will close include a sketch of ineffability-talk as a particular self-negating language game (as opposed to being merely a self-contradiction), drawing on remarks in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
It is hoped that this discussion will contribute to the further understanding of grammatical and poetic techniques in addressing the ineffable, and the variety of their applications.
“‘Big Data’ History: Digital Sources and Historical Rhetoric” by James Freeman
Large datasets have become an icon of the digital humanities agenda. At the very least, many scholars are now familiar with Google’s N-Gram and its pitfalls. Yet, with the on-going digitisation of our past, the opportunities and imperatives for historians to use vast quantities of unstructured data have multiplied, albeit alongside persistent methodological problems and entry barriers.
This paper tackles these issues from the perspective of research investigating the place of freedom in political rhetoric during the 20th Century. Specifically, it harnesses large corpora of political speech, including c. 800 million words of Hansard, to reveal how politicians used ‘freedom’ and related terms in arguments. Research suggests that politicians normally placed freedom within particular semantic fields such as religion or warfare. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how translating established rhetorical theories into algorithms can answer complex questions, such as whether the structure of freedom-arguments changed over time. Research also identifies recurring ‘freedom-memes’ and posits 1939-50 as formative in shaping how we argue using freedom.
Overall, the paper claims that, when open about its limitations, sophisticated text-mining can enhance rather than replace traditional readings of historical sources. As such, it constitutes one example of how digitisation is transforming research in the humanities.