ANTH 493: Linguistic Anthropology

In You’re Wearing That? (Saturday Evening Post Sep/Oct2007, Vol. 279 Issue 5, p46-48, 3p) Deborah Tannen explores the conversations between mothers and daughters.  Tannen claims “there is a special intensity to the mother-daughter relationship because talk–particularly talk about personal topics–plays a larger and more complex role in girls’ and women’s social lives than in boys’ and men’s.”

 Tannen cites hair, clothing, and weight as the ‘Big Three’ topics of critique between mothers and daughters.  Tannen demonstrates how a question can be used as a critique.  The way of asking a question, the timing and the context, change its meaning.  Tannen indulges in a bit of cognitive therapy:  “Reframing is often key to dissipating anger. “  She argues that if we can impose a particular interpretation on the words of others, we can be happier for it.

How do the politicians frame the issues? Where does the language of leadership come from? Speechwriters for President Bush fight to claim his mouth. Read about it in Mathew Scully’s Present at the Creation from The Atlantic, 9/07. Here is a link to full text from Hunter Library’s Academic Search Premier. Mathew Scully harshly criticizes his colleague Michael Gerson for taking credit for Bush’s public speeches. Scully offers a glimpse into the process of crafting political theater: “I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses — not even ‘axis of evil.’”

Today we watch American Tongues, a video produced by the Center for New American Media.  Here is a JSTOR review of the video by Rolf Kjolseth