Episode 4 I’m like, social structure really pisses me off!

Linguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts.

I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I use the word ‘like’ a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of ‘like’ as a quotative has a particular function when you study it in relation to the structure of spoken narrative.

Grammatical structure, narrative structure – just the kind of structures I love. But the use of ‘like’ is often also studied in terms of its relation to aspects of social structure: which types of people are most likely to use it, and how it’s likely to be judged.

When I start thinking about the links between grammatical structure and social structure, I’m no longer thrilled about being objective and descriptive. I start to ask myself a few questions:

Can I study social structure objectively? Can I simply describe social structure? Can I treat social structure as if it were beautiful, the way I understand linguistic structure to be? And the answer was no, actually. Social structure really pisses me off. I hate the way society is structured. I don’t like the fact that society is structured according to a class system, or according to a race system or according to gender inequities. I don’t want to simply describe that. I really wanna judge that!

And I also want to find alternatives. More on that next week.