CANCELLED
Event: Language in Context Seminar
Date: 18 March, 2020
Time: 15:10 – 16.30
Venue: Room G.01, 50 George Square
Speaker: Tom Bartlett (University of Glasgow, School of Critical Studies)
Title of talk: No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Towards a materialist account of context and social change
Abstract: In this talk I will bring together the architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory which normally considers language as a social phenomenon to the relative neglect of the psychological, with concepts from systems theory (Kretzschmar 2015), evolutionary biolinguistics (Pennisi and Falzone 2016) and cultural evolution (Rogers 1989; Rendell et al. 2010; Pagel 2012). Combining these frameworks goes some way to providing a materialist account of the relationship between language and context as a metastable system – a system that is stable enough to be recognisable and usable, yet dynamic enough to cater to synchronic variation and stimulate diachronic change.
In the first part of the talk I will provide an outline of the architecture of SFL, with a focus on the indeterminate relationship between context and semantics - “the cracks where the light gets in” (Cohen 1992) and through which social innovation emerges. In the second part, I will draw on evolutionary theory to account for the contours of variation across contexts and the processes of change that typify a metastable system. And in the third part, I will discuss the implications of the theoretical framework in analysing data from nursing handover meetings.
Cohen, Leonard. 1992. Anthem.
Kretzschmar, W. A. 2015. Language and Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pagel, Mark. 2012. Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation. London: Penguin.
Pennisi, Antonio and Alessandra Falzone. 2016. Darwinian Biolinguistics: Theory and History of a
Naturalistic Philosophy of Language and Pragmatics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Rogers, Alan R. 1989 Does biology constrain culture? American Anthropologist 90 (4), pp.819-831
Rendell, L. et al. 2010. Why copy others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament
Science 328, pp. 208-13