{"id":695,"date":"2018-08-31T12:39:59","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T10:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/?p=695"},"modified":"2018-08-31T12:58:59","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T10:58:59","slug":"linguistics-and-poetry-and-speaking-in-someone-elses-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/2018\/08\/31\/linguistics-and-poetry-and-speaking-in-someone-elses-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistics and Poetry and speaking in someone else’s voice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roman Jakobson wrote eloquently about the insights which linguistic analysis could bring to our understanding of poetry and of the importance of poetry to a full understanding of language (Jakobson 1960<\/a>, apparently his most cited article ever).<\/p>\n

These days many working linguists stick to analyzing more prosaic utterances, but a few still keep their hand in the game.<\/p>\n

There was a recent kerfuffle at the American progressive political periodical The Nation<\/em> when they published a short poem<\/a> by a poet named Anders Carlson-Wee\u00a0which imagines a homeless person in the first person, and uses turns of vernacular closely associated with African Americans (such as copula drop—as in, \u201cif you a girl\u201d for \u2018if you are a girl\u2019). Pockets of the internet erupted in indignation that a white poet was appropriating a black voice and the The Nation<\/em>\u2019s poetry editors prostrated themselves before the mob, disavowing the poem and appending a \u201ctrigger warning\u201d to it for \u201cgiv[ing] offense and caus[ing] harm to members of several communities.\u201d The poet apologized for the offense and harm caused.<\/p>\n

John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, has published a thoughtful defense<\/a> of the writer\u2019s use of language in the poem in the periodical The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0which seems to me to be very much in the spirit of Jakobson 1960. McWhorter trains a linguist\u2019s eye on the poet\u2019s use of African American Vernacular English or Black English, and comments on it in the broader social context. I think it\u2019s a nice example of how linguistics can provide an informed perspective on matters of current public interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roman Jakobson wrote eloquently about the insights which linguistic analysis could bring to our understanding of poetry and of the importance of poetry to a full understanding of language (Jakobson 1960, apparently his most cited article ever). These days many … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":690,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":699,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}