Semiotics & Culture Speaker Series: Screened out

Join us at this new speaker series hosted by Professors Hongbing Yu and Dana Osborne. This year's theme is "Meaning-making across language, culture, and media". The three-part speaker series is presented with the kind support of the Faculty of Arts Events and Outreach Fund.

Does the language that you speak influence the way that you see the world?  Since the 1990s, “neo-Whorfian” work on this possibility (Lucy 1996, Danziger 2001) has proceeded by showing co-variation of preferences in speech and in non-speech problem-solving across different language populations.  In this avenue of research, particularly influential findings have come from speech forms like “north” and “left” that are used to talk about locations in space (Pederson et al 1998, Levinson 2003).  The present paper looks closely at a striking example of coordinated speech and gesture repair in a Mopan (Mayan) text from Eastern Central America, to show that it is not only lexical forms like “left” and “north” which participate in Whorfian alternations when talking about space, but also deictic forms like “here” and “this”. The fact that linguistic deixis has up to now been excluded from neo-Whorfian study of spatial language should be understood as a lapse of completeness in data collection, rather than well-motivated by analysis.