Structured Visions

Here’s how to get fascinated by language if you’re not already. This might even feel a little bit like a transcendent, or mystical experience.

1. Find a window and look through it.
2. Focus first on the scene outside the window.
3. Then focus on the windowpane itself.
4. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the landscape outside.

Now think of a word, like cake. Thinking of the meaning of cake is like looking at the scene through the window. Thinking of the form of the word cake (the sounds, if it’s spoken, or the letters, if it’s written) is like looking at the windowpane.

When we toggle between form and meaning, we can play with words or phrases that have more than one meaning.

So you can play with phrases printed on ordinary objects, like a stick of deodorant. ‘Original scent’. What was the original scent? The big bang? The Garden of Eden?

What about ‘the first person’? What does that phrase conjure for you? A 3.2-million-year-old ape named Lucy? Or that guy in Eden called Adam?

Or maybe you’re so fascinated by language that you thought of grammatical personhood. First person: I, me. Second person: you. Third person: he, she it. Can a language have more than three persons?  

Yes! The Blackfoot language has five.

Read my short story ‘The first person’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

What we think about language reveals what we think about society. Will changing our ideas about language help us create a more welcoming world?

In this episode we explore performative utterances like ‘You’re the boss’ or ‘You’re in charge’. These are more horrifying than you might think.

Often we think of language and power as commodities that can be bestowed on individuals swimming around in the fish tank of social structure. What if instead we thought of language as a sustaining fluid that keeps our social selves safe? The call for all of us then would be to maintain the cleanliness of this fluid, so all are free to exist within it.

Read my very short story ‘In charge’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

Download Episode 62: Who’s the boss?

How do we respond to knowing that we’re stuck in a language system that’s built to contradict itself, and a social structure built upon exchange? We have to find ways to outwit the confines of language.

Read my very short story ‘Echos and their others’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

Download Episode 61: Echos and their others.

What’s new in Structured Visions, version 2.0?

We’ll still be exploring social structure. We’ll still be geeking out about language. But now I’ll be linking up my discussions to my most recent experiment – combining creative writing with my love of linguistics.

Find out more and read ‘Echos and their Others’ at grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

I’m so glad you’re here!

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

Download the Season 2 Teaser: Grammar for dreamers.

Welcome back to the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode we save the world. For me, saving the world means identifying ‘new ways of thinking about social structure’. Here are the things that need rethinking:

We can tackle all of these from a range of different disciplines, but on the Structured Visions podcast, we spend most of our time in the ‘linguistics’ section of the world library. If linguistics is going to change the world, we’ll need a new story about language. In the old story, language comes at the end of an evolutionary narrative – it’s a means by which complex organisms can communicate with their species. In the new story, language isn’t the newcomer – it was there from the beginning, approximately squillions of years ago. According to the new story, language is primarily a mechanism for producing structures. Like DNA, and RNA.

To explore this idea, we need to know something about how DNA and RNA produce structures. Thankfully, we have John Perry from Stated Clearly and Your genome to help us.

And we’ll have a look at a strand of language from Marcus, an American in Strasbourg. What structure is he producing when he says, about French people in the supermarket, ‘They’re all like, “Stupid American”’?

So here’s how to save the world with linguistics, in three simple steps:

And then cultivate these alternative patterns. Imagine new structures, and cultivate them.

What ideas do you have about saving the world? Let me know in the comments. Or on twitter: @jodieclarkling

Can’t wait to hear from you.

Download Episode 60: How linguistics can save the world.

Linguist, communication expert and digital media scholar Erika Darics asks ‘Shouldn’t scholars in Critical Discourse Studies be political activists? What is the point of exposing injustice if we stop there?’

In this episode I address Erika’s question. Spoiler alert: the answer is a resounding YES.

And I celebrate the question ‘What is the point?’

Please keep sending me suggestions for podcast topics. I welcome them with an open imagination and a commitment to enquiry and activism.

Download Episode 59: Enquiry, imagination and action.

In this episode I share the talk I gave at the Symposium at Sheffield Hallam University on January 12, 2017, in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement.

Many thanks to all who participated in the event, including fellow speakers, Chris Christie, Lucy Jones, Shân Wareing and Karen Grainger.

Special thanks to Dave Sayers and Alice Bell for organising such a moving tribute to Sara.

Is there something you’d like me to discuss in an upcoming podcast? Get in touch!

Click here to access the slides from the talk.

Download Episode 58: Communities of Sara Mills.