Structured Visions

Jodie Clark

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Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.

AUG 28

Love language

To what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure? In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys. This is a problem when it comes to love. If we see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, then love becomes part of a transitive syntactical arrangement which requires a subject that is separate from an object. But it’s worth considering the distinct pleasure of separation. It makes it possible to experience the uniqueness of being loved, of being unknown, of being a mystery. As I always say, intimacy is embedded in the structure of language. The research I discuss comes from Chapter 8 of The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. You can get a copy from Sheffield Hallam University’s institutional repository. Here are the transcripts. The story I read is ‘A glimpse.’ Check out my new free course, Grammar for Dreamers. Check out my old free course, Writing through the Lens of Language. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

45 min
JUL 31

The linguistics of tapping

What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you. When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond language—our bodies, the earth—we access the worlds ‘created from silence’, the mystery, and the spaces where something new can emerge. The stories I read in this episode are The origin of all destruction and Vasilisa. My favourite EFT resource is The Tapping Solution. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

46 min
JUN 26

Clap if you believe in fairies

Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii). In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world. What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the world? I draw upon principles from M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to explain what aspects of the ‘architecture of language’ keep us confined within the dark prison of selfhood. Each of Halliday’s metafunctions contribute, I posit, to how selfhood confines us, through the linear experience of time (the textual metafunction), the need to vie for social status (the interpersonal metafunction) and the assumption of separate worldviews (the ideational metafunction). We can learn about the world we can’t access by examining the restrictive shapes of selfhood that human language produces. We can also imagine the possibility that our experience is restrictive by design—that the Earth developed a means to create separate consciousnesses so that it could experience the mystery of intimacy. The story I read in this episode is ‘F in the ELLPH.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

53 min
MAY 29

What makes you so special?

The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special. It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special. Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption. My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less conscious than the material world. A lot less conscious. Find out what I mean through an exploration of nouns and copular verbs. The stories I read in this episode are ‘Possessive’ and ‘The problem with talking to trees.’ If you enjoyed the ‘think of a word’ exercise, you can do it again in Episode 64, ‘The intimacy embedded in language.’ If you’d like to hear more about how language makes humans less conscious than the rest of the world, listen to Episode 94, ‘Language and the afterlife’ and Episode 104 ‘Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie.’ If you’d like to hear about the Earth’s language, try Episode 96. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter You can see what I did with the words my History of English students wrote on scraps of paper in Grammar for Dreamers, the screenplay, available here: jodieclark.com/screenplay Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

48 min
APR 30

Adulting, and stuff like that

Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders). If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to Episode 86 (Feelings are, like, inside things). In this episode I discuss general extenders, which take the form CONJUNCTION + PROFORM + (optional) MODIFER: and stuff (like that), and things (like that), and everything (like that), and all (that), or something (like that), or anything (like that). I discuss an article by Maryann Overstreet that examines how general extenders have become grammaticalized over time. They have followed a common pattern in grammaticalization, where linguistic elements go from being mostly propositional or ideational, to mostly interpersonal. In other words, when bits of language become more incorporated into grammatical structure, they become more subjective, more oriented to self. But my obsession with the mysteries of language, which was sparked in my terrifying early adulthood, has led me to wonder if all the grammar of human languages is oriented to self—organised around the principle of selfhood. The assumption that human beings are more conscious because they have language often remains unquestioned. But what if human beings—limited as they are by a self-producing human language—are less conscious than the rest of the material world? In this episode I propose that the more-than-human-world is organised according to principles other than selfhood. There is no division. There may be layers of perspectives, but not the division of selfhood that requires perspectives be separate from each other. Here's the transcript I was reading from. The story I read in this episode is ‘The Earth's boast.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

1h 2m
MAR 27

Heaven and Earth

The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage. The story I read in this episode is ‘Logogenesis.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

53 min
FEB 27

Prosody and peak experiences

Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic). If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is! In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences, is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self. And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow. That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it. What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery? Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others. Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it. The story I read in this episode is ‘The luthier.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

1h 1m
JAN 30

Given, new and the selfless know-it-all

What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things. In this episode we play with the idea that individual minds, with different states of knowledge, didn’t precede, but are produced by language. We pose the hypothesis that human language shapes the experience of selfhood—which therefore restricts our capacity to know everything. We also talk about Ted Chiang’s brilliant novella, The story of your life. But if you want to know what will happen in the future, you’re out of luck, because the future is a projection of the self, moving in a linear way through time. What are your thoughts about the ideas discussed in this episode? Because I have a self, I can’t know until you tell me. The story I read in this episode is ‘The dark art of world-building.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

54 min

Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.

Creator

Jodie Clark
Years Active

2021 - 2025
Episodes

115
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© (c) Jodie Clark
Show Website

Structured Visions