Karol Janicki

A hindrance to communication: the use of difficult and incomprehensible language

This paper gives a brief theoretical background to and reports on three empirical studies carried out within the theoretical framework of folk linguistics, using questionnaire data. The paper is concerned with the layperson’s reactions to the use of difficult and incomprehensible language. In study 1, subjects from Norway, Poland, Germany, and the USA were asked to indicate which professional groups exhibit the use of difficult language. They were also asked to suggest reasons for that use. In study 2, subjects from Norway, Poland, Germany, and the UK were asked to answer questions concerning the use of incomprehensible language in the academic community. Study 3 was similar to study 2, but in this case only highly comparable subjects from the USA and Poland were recruited. The three studies show that the use of difficult and incomprehensible language is perceived by the layperson as a serious sociolinguistic problem. They point to lawyers, politicians, computer specialists, academics and medical doctors as the heaviest users of such language. They also show that such language exerts much negative impact on the educational process and that the educational domain is a huge potential field for future research in this respect.

The function of the Standard variety: a contrastive study of Norwegian and Polish

Les As. examinent et comparent la fonction sociale des varietes standards de polonais et de norvegien. Si le polonais standard jouit dun statut social tres eleve, la situation se revele fort differente pour le norvegien. Aucune variete standard de norvegien nest enseignee a lecole et il existe deux varietes standards ecrites qui, malgre leur proximite linguistique, symbolisent pour la plupart des norvegiens des contrastes geographiques, culturels et politiques. Le developpement et les conditions sociohistoriques du norvegien et du polonais sont decrites de maniere a rendre compte des differences entre ces deux langues

A rebuttal of essentialist sociolinguistics

The term essentialist sociolinguistics is my own term. Essentialism itself, however, can be traced back to Popper (1945, 1957, 1959,1972), who uses the label in his critical argument against Aristotle. Aristotle claims that all things have their form or essences (1983). The essence of a thing is something like its internal source of change and motion (Popper 1945). It is that very Aristotelian philosophical standpoint that Popper refers to as essentialism. For Aristotle (Popper 1945) the term that is to be defined is the name of the essence of a thing, and the defining formula the description of that essence. Popper summarizes Aristotles position in the following way:

Words, Words, Words…, and Tables, Cars and Elephants — Intensional and Extensional Orientation

What usually matters to us is what people do rather than what they say. Having read Russell’s passage, this is what we might presume should be the case. Words may be seen as mere symbols; they stand for something else. We can change them, coin new ones instantly, manipulate them, abandon them, forget them, and so on. Why should we treat them seriously? What appears to be most important to most of us is what happens to our body — whether we are for example physically unhurt and unimpeded, well fed, warm. Are words in fact often taken very seriously?

Can You Imagine It? — The Role of Visualization and Context in Understanding Discourse

Walter Lewin, professor of physics at MIT has recently been acclaimed as an outstanding teacher. Films shown on YouTube, newspaper and magazine articles, and interviews with Prof. Lewin give evidence to support this expectation. Since his course in physics was put on YouTube, enthusiasm for his teaching methods has skyrocketed. What makes Prof. Lewin’s methods so successful? Visualizations. He not only or mainly talks about physics; he not only shows students pictures and graphs (which may certainly be seen as a form of visualization), he takes visualization to the extreme. He acts in class. He uses real metal balls, containers, vehicles, sticks, and so on, that he rides or throws around in class to illustrate the basic laws of physics. Moreover, he swings himself on real ropes and throws heavy balls against his head to further illustrate the laws.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys — Two-Valued and Multi-Valued Orientation

There are people who tend to think in terms of opposites — black and white, good guys and bad guys, and so on. There are others who tend to doubt that the world around us can be adequately grasped in terms of such opposites. There are still others who tend to mix these two approaches. The third group of people often realizes that viewing phenomena in terms of opposites simplifies matters considerably and that we often in fact face gray areas and continua rather than two clear-cut opposites. Thinking in terms of opposites (which may be seen as reflecting a philosophical and psychological position referred to as essentialism, Hallett 1991) appears to be deeply ingrained in many people’s minds (see for instance, Janicki 2006). Such thinking can be traced back thousands of years (at least to Aristotle, in the history of philosophy) and is taken by many to be a natural approach to the world around us (see Medin and Ortony 1989). We often talk about two-valued (two opposites) or multi-valued orientation. Although there is probably nobody who is exclusively two-valued or multi-valued oriented, many of us exhibit a tendency one way or the other. It is our languages (including English) that often drag us into the world of opposites.

What are You Talking About? — Language and Abstraction

Some authors like to begin their books on discourse or language by asking questions such as ‘what is discourse?’ and ‘what is language?’ I will not do so for reasons that should become clear later (see Chapter 6). I will begin by saying that language may be seen as different kinds of things. It may be seen as something that we know, or write; it may be seen as behavior, that is, something that we perform or produce; it may be seen as something that you can hear, that you can preserve with writing materials, and so on. In other words, language may be seen as different kinds of objects. As a result, it can also be studied in many different ways, partly depending on what you view it to be. Among all kinds of views on, approaches to, and disagreements about language, one position appears to be indisputable, namely, the position that language may be treated as a symbolic system. Studying language as a symbolic system leads us to the question of the various functions or uses of language. We use language for several reasons or, we might say, language serves several functions: we use it to pass information on to other people; we use it to warn other people of approaching danger; we use it to express our feelings; we use it to challenge other people, we also use it to show to the interlocutor where, socially, we come from, and so on. Some of these functions we, the language users, are fairly well aware of; others less so.

The Unfortunate Word ‘is’: ‘Is’ of Identity and ‘is’ of Predication; E-Prime

Several writers have drawn our attention to the danger of using the verb ‘to be’ in English, for instance, Lee (1994), Johnston (1991), Ralph (1991), Kellog (1991), Bourland (1991). Many scholars point to Bourland as the most prominent of these writers. He discussed the verb ‘to be’ at much length and offered the term E-Prime as the label to refer to English without the verb ‘be’. The idea of ‘beless’ English, or ‘beless’ language, can be traced back, however, much further than the early 1990s. According to Gozzi (1997), it can be traced as far back as Lycophron in ancient Greece.

Words are Not What They Refer to — The Map is Not the Territory

Rene Magritte’s well known picture of the pipe may be taken as a wonderful illustration of how people often mix symbols and what these symbols stand for. My picture of an apple (Picture 22), modeled on that by Magritte, is to help me illustrate the relationship in question. Show this picture to a friend, cover the words saying ‘this is not an apple’, and ask the question: ‘what is it?’ The likelihood will be very high that your friend will say ‘this is an apple’. When you start talking about the picture and point to the fact that it is not really an apple, that it should be seen as a picture, a representation, a symbol of an apple, your friend will certainly agree and probably add that what you are saying is obvious and that you are involving him or her in a fruitless exercise. Note, however, that your friend’s answer to the original question was ‘this is an apple’, which, strictly speaking, was obviously wrong and which reflects a major confusion between a symbol (for instance, the picture of an apple) and what it refers to (a real apple which you can buy in the produce section of a grocery store).

Learning New Words — How We Develop Meaning

Much misunderstanding and problems with comprehension are easily explained once we think of how we acquire new words and how they develop meaning for us. When we first hear or read a word, our brain, our nervous system, abstracts. The nervous system enables us to associate a particular word (for instance, ‘horse’) with a particular segment of non-verbal reality (the real horse with flesh, tail, hooves, and so on) The process of abstraction is closely connected with social agreement: we agree (tacitly; we usually do not discuss this!) with other people to call a particular object, or inner feeling, or relation, for example, in a particular way. We learn the label or the labels. For instance, we learn to call the animal depicted in Picture 10 below a ‘horse’.