Instructions:1. After reading chapter 6, write-up your responses to the prompts below.2. Submit your reading reflection as a .pdf in Moodle.Reflection questions:1. What was the most meaningful, interesting, or significant thing you learned from this chapter?Next, answer the following:2. A quote by Toni Morrison (found in this chapter) states, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” (Morrison, 1994, p. 16) Write a short essay (3-4 paragraphs) explaining what you think Toni Morrison means by this quotation and how it relates to what you are learning in Chapter 6. Please reference the textbook when necessary and also include your own thoughts, ideas, and examples to illustrate your argument.3. Think of a time when you heard someone use oppressive language (either directed at you or someone else). What do you think may be the possible effects of using this particular language?
READING REFLECTION CHAPTER 6
Instructions:
1.
2.
After reading chapter 6, write-up your responses to one of the options below.
Submit your reading reflection as a .pdf in Moodle.
Reflection questions:
1. What was the most meaningful, interesting, or significant thing you learned
from this chapter?
Next, answer the following:
2. A quote by Toni Morrison (found in this chapter) states, “Oppressive
language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than
represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” (Morrison, 1994, p.
16) Write a short essay (3-4 paragraphs) explaining what you think Toni
Morrison means by this quotation and how it relates to what you are
learning in Chapter 6. Please reference the textbook when necessary and
also include your own thoughts, ideas, and examples to illustrate your
argument.
3. Think of a time when you heard someone use oppressive language (either
directed at you or someone else). What do you think may be the possible
effects of using this particular language?
Communication
A Critical/Cultural
Introduction
Deanna L. Fassett | John T. Warren | Keith Nainby
COMMUNICATION
A Critical/Cultural Introduction
•
CHAPTER 6: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Overview
•
Explore the relationship
between language and
culture.
•
Describe the role of power
in language.
•
Articulate how culture
influences our language.
•
Apply constitutive theories
of language to everyday
life.
•
Apply inclusive language to
public communication.
What Are Semiotics?
● The structure of language, asking
how we could understand language
via the use of symbols and their
connected referents.
● Semiotics do not address how
power affects the ways we make
meaning.
● Semiotic Perspective
○ the understanding of language as arbitrary,
ambiguous, and abstract.
● Verbal Communication
○ Language and other symbol-oriented
systems.
Language and Signs
• Signifier the spoken and/or written representation
of something or someone, such as the word “cat”
and visualizing a cat.
– To make a word signified represents the meanings we associate
with that word.
• Working together, the signifier (the spoken or
written representation) and the signified the
connotative or associative meanings of the term)
become the sign.
• Language is the ideological struggle of finding
meaning. In other words: we are all advancing our
own vision to understand the world, as it is shaped
and limited by language
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
● A claim about the relationship between
language and reality that many
communication scholars find compelling
● First advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and
subsequently developed by Benjamin Whorf
● Often defined to include two versions: the
strong hypothesis and the weak hypothesis:
● The strong version says that language determines thought
and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive
categories.
● The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage
only influence thought and decisions.
Verbal Communication and Its Structure
• What is verbal communication?
– Language and other symbol-oriented systems.
• Speech Act Theory
– Explores how people use language rather than only
(or primarily) study the structure of language.
– The locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the
perlocutionary act.
• Constatives are words that describe or
identify a state of affairs.
– Performatives create the state of affairs
• Part of your role as a critically
compassionate speaker, as someone who
hopes to engender positive change in the
world, is to embrace language that makes it
possible for continued conversation.
V. N. Volosinov
• A central figure in the development
of constitutive approaches to
language
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voloshinov.png
• Volosinov theories are built on
critical engagement with Wilhelm
von Humboldt’s concept of language
as a continuous creative or
“generative” process, and with the
view of language as a sign-system.
Language and Its Consequences
• Oppressive Language
– Oppressive language feeds off of the fear of the
‘nondominant culture’ and doesn’t only represent
violence, it is violent and discourages the exchange of
new possibilities and ideas for change in the world.
– Sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful
language has consequences for you and for the people
who hear you speak it.
• Our language has effects that extend beyond
our intentions, effects that have good and bad
consequences not only for ourselves.
– You can either invite people into dialogue or you can
encourage their disinterest, apathy, or rigidity with
respect to an issue.

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