Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time.

To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre.

What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time?

The story I read in this episode is ‘The end.’

Some time sensitive things to act on now:

Refreshing Grammar (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access

Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT

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In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).

The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.

On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘What’s up?’ by Elaine Hodgson.

The story I read is ‘The Museum of Language.’

Lots of things going on…

Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access

Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT

Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block.

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What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience.

The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language.

The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience.

If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more?

The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions.

But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint.

The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘Moving language’.

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Last week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we’re imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance.

I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the alien world of the American high school. Eckert’s book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide between ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ and shows how the kids create meaningful categories according to the things they do, not just what social class they come from.

Bucholtz’s article, ‘“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls’ describes a group of self-proclaimed ‘nerds’ in another American high school. These girls, she explains, are constructing their own social category that subverts ‘cool’ identities.

I ask: how easy it is to subvert established social categories in a given social structure?

I ask: why are social categories – even subversive ones – based on acceptance/rejection? Can we imagine a social world where there’s nothing but acceptance?

I decide to move from being an objective anthropologist to a regular person, with subjective experiences. I time travel back to being a kid at school myself, sitting in the school lunchroom staring down my shyness, my peers and … my peas. Eureka! I discover the value of creating a new story.

Linguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts.

I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I use the word ‘like’ a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of ‘like’ as a quotative has a particular function when you study it in relation to the structure of spoken narrative.

Grammatical structure, narrative structure – just the kind of structures I love. But the use of ‘like’ is often also studied in terms of its relation to aspects of social structure: which types of people are most likely to use it, and how it’s likely to be judged.

When I start thinking about the links between grammatical structure and social structure, I’m no longer thrilled about being objective and descriptive. I start to ask myself a few questions:

Can I study social structure objectively? Can I simply describe social structure? Can I treat social structure as if it were beautiful, the way I understand linguistic structure to be? And the answer was no, actually. Social structure really pisses me off. I hate the way society is structured. I don’t like the fact that society is structured according to a class system, or according to a race system or according to gender inequities. I don’t want to simply describe that. I really wanna judge that!

And I also want to find alternatives. More on that next week.

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘grammar’? Red pen marks all over your assignments? Being told there’s something wrong with the way you speak or write? A disgruntled feeling when you see a misplaced apostrophe?

My love of grammar has never been about recognising ‘errors’ in speech or writing. For me it’s a fascination with the beauty of structure. When I was an undergraduate at Washington College I got to play with structure regularly as part of Bob Anderson’s class in symbolic logic.* Then in a music class taught by Amzie Parcell, I had a moment of synaesthesia where logical structure become not just an intellectual experience, but also an auditory and emotional one.

My introduction to the study of linguistics was with John Lyons’s book, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. I read the book as part of an MA in English Linguistics I did at the University of Strasbourg. I found Lyons’s words on misconceptions about grammar particularly inspiring:

There are all sorts of social and nationalistic prejudices associated with language, and many popular misconceptions fostered by the distorted version of traditional grammar that is frequently taught in the schools. To free one’s mind of these prejudices and misconceptions is indeed difficult; but it is both a necessary and a rewarding first step. (p. 2)

However, in spouting out my new ideas about freeing our minds of prejudices and misconceptions, I learned that the connection between people’s views about language and their internalised social structures are more intimate than I’d realised.

If we admit there’s an intimate connection between people’s sense of social structure and their sense of grammatical structure, what will that then reveal? What alternatives to unjust social structures can we find?

* Here’s Peter Suber’s solution to the logic problem I remember from college. Isn’t it beautiful? Delilah wore a ring on every finger and had a finger in every pie. (x)(y)[(Fxd · Ry)  (Oyx] · (x)(y)[(Fxd · Py)  Ixy]

In this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the numbered grids. What if ‘whiteness’ was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, ‘Whiteness as property’.) What if it you were graded on your level of ‘Americanness’? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived in France.

What does grammar have to do with any of this? I ask listeners to consider the difference between these three clauses, which come from a story that was told to me by an American student living in Strasbourg:

1. We are making a Christmas tree.
2. That is so American.
3. Jennifer is more American than me.

Clause 1 is an example of what in Systemic Functional Grammar is called a material process, realised by the verb phrase are making.

Clauses 2 and 3 are examples of relational processes, realised by the verb is.

Relational clauses sometimes put people on a Chutes and Ladders-type grid: they situate you, statically, in a particular social structure. (I am white. I am a lecturer. I am American.) In their most ‘normal’ form – that is, their unmarked form, they’re in the simple past or the simple present. What happens if you were to use the present-in-present form (otherwise known as present continuous or present progressive)? I am being American. I am being white. Does that upset the Chutes and Ladders board?

Next week I’ll talk more about these types of ‘grammatical intervention’.

The book I mentioned, cited in Cheryl Harris’s article, is Two Nations by Andrew Hacker.

The type of grammar I’m using is Systemic Functional Grammar, and my reference guide is Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode I look at aspects of racial injustice. I share some perspectives from my five-year-old self to show how certain logical structures enabled me to cope when I first noticed racial inequality. I talk more about what it means to understand racism, or any other form of social injustice, as structured. I invite listeners to start imagining new structures.

If we can start noticing social structures that lead to social injustice or are a result of social injustice, then we are also in a position to identify alternatives.

And I put forward this idea as a teaser:

The way we structure our worlds has its mirror in the grammatical structure of how we speak.

Tune in to the next episode to hear more about grammar and the structure of social worlds.

In this episode I mention Drs Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll test and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva‘s chapter in the book White Out, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world?

Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’?

The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness.

The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the word numen, meaning divinity, god or spirit.

Language gives you access to divinity.

But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion.

The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘Salesman to the gods’. The other story I mention in ‘Ghosts’.

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When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths. It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice.

In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage.

In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.)

The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘Death of a grammarian’.

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Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out, its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world.

The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘Nonna’s prophecy’.

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in?

What’s the difference between this and that?

There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric.

Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language.

The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy.

The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism.

The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other.

The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from:

Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHITFP-2

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’

—from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127

Can something be both practical and dreamy?

Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery?

We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow.

The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body.

How can the self exist outside the body?

How can experience exist outside of the world?

This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘In plain sight’, and it’s available at grammarfordreamers.com.

Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course.

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What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it.

Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice.

An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood experiences in her book Talkin That Talk. After her family moved from rural Tennessee to Detroit, Smitherman’s teachers decided that the way she spoke indicated a lack of intelligence and put her back a year in school. Later she was placed in speech therapy because the educators didn’t recognise her linguistic variety, African-American Vernacular English, as a legitimate form of English.

Ann Phoenix’s work describes similar racism encountered by Afro-Caribbean children in British schools, who spoke perfectly grammatically in a variety that was not White enough for their teachers and peers.

As I’ve written, ‘To be grammar shamed is to be told there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you’ve expressed yourself. The implication is often that there’s something wrong with you: you’re not smart enough, you’re not well educated enough, you’re not savvy enough, you’re not “in the know,” you don’t have the right kind of cultural capital and/or you shouldn’t be taking up space on whatever platform you’re using.’ (Clark, 2023, pp. 5-6)

The story I read in this episode, ‘Little red grammar hood’, hints at a deeper grammar, a welcoming grammar, one that is not shamed.  

Clues about such a grammar can be found through an exploration of what babies know about the grammar of the language that surrounds them, before they’ve even begun to speak themselves.

In my forthcoming book, Refreshing Grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people, I offer ways to tap into what you’ve known about grammar since you were a little cutie pie. Before you even knew you knew it.

Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Prepare to be refreshed!

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Works I discuss in the podcast

Clark, J. (2023). Refreshing grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people. GFD.

Naigles, L. R. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition, 86(2), 157–199.

Phoenix, A. (2009). De-colonising practices: negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 12(1), 101–114.

Smitherman, G. (2000). Talkin that talk: language, culture, and education in African America. Routledge.

If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home?

If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language.

The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language.

The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes.

In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds: reimagining social change. We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting.

The transcript and table I refer to can be found here.

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When you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you?

Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently?

For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that.

The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is a way of creating the experience of a self, with an inside and an outside.

Maybe the self is one expression of the Earth’s evolution, and language—specifically grammar—is the mechanism by which the self comes into being.

The story I read in this episode is ‘The multidimensional language learners’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out.

Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all?

In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’.

We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood.

As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’

What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence?

In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge.

The story I read is ‘My late grandmother’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

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Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself.

The story I read is ‘The last stage of the Earth’s evolution.’ I also mentioned my story ‘Summers with Mad Gran.’

Connect with me on jodieclark.com. Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse

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Where’s home?

What’s your first language?

What was your language before your first language?

Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Poor Magellan’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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How often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job.

In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects.

I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane that constitutes the self. An oppressive society requires a rigid membrane. A welcoming society respects the membrane, and honours the opportunities for intimacy inherent in the language-created notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.

The natural world provides illustrative examples of the types of symbiotic relationships that membranes offer. We even have, I was surprised to discover, a symbiotic relationship with viruses. Eight percent of the human genome has its origin in DNA from viruses. Our relationship and understanding of viruses can give us ideas about how to integrate those aspects of self and world that we’d prefer to keep distant.

The book I mention in this episode is Frank Ryan’s Virolution.

The story I read in this episode is ‘To meet you’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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A question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words?

Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023?

If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one day soon the words may simply dry up, leaving you to face the blinking cursor of doom.

Rather than understanding language as divisible into quantifiable chunks (words), I think of language as fluid, a membrane in constant flux, forming and reforming around different imaginings of the self, the other, the world. When writers are in a flow state, I believe it’s because they’re allowing language to work its magic of shaping and reshaping selves.

Join me to discuss writer’s block, life purpose and (why not?) The Sound of Music.

I mention two of my stories in this episode, ‘The words of your language,’ and ‘Coming true’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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‘What are your pronouns?’

How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you?

This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Of prophets and pronouns’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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Is nothing sacred?

What images or memories does this question conjure for you?

Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.)

When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word.

Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘The Determiners’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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In this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy:

• Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world.
• What separates us is human language.
• The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment.
• And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separation is shaped.

We’ll talk about some of those mysteries, specifically the grammatical principle of possession.

To get a flavour of what’s in store, hold up one of your hands in front of you so that you can see it. Ask yourself the question: ‘Is this my hand?’

Did you entertain the possibility that your hand might be possessed? As we’ll discover, it is possessed. The possessive determiner my tells us so.

Possession gives us a mechanism for creating two things where before there was only unity or wholeness. It allows us to divide absolutely anything up. And it allows us to redraw the boundaries around our experience.

With language—not just possessive forms in language, but with language in general—you have the capacity to shape a self... and to make decisions about what belongs to that self.

Language constructs selfhood, which gives us the experience of separation from the world. But what we learn by studying the intricacies of language is how malleable this selfhood is. The dynamic of selfhood can change literally with every utterance. And I believe that close attention to language can show us new ways of shaping the self, and thus, of shaping our communities and our world.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Possessed’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Come to my free live online workshop on October 21st! It’s called ‘The creative logic of language’, and it’s offered by Off the Shelf Festival of Words and Sheffield Hallam University.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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Have you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation.

The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Messages’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

What propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation?

And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable?

In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’.

We’re playing with these ideas:

• Human language gives the human body the experience of existing separately from the rest of the natural world.
• Human language allows the human body to have a unique and specific experience of pleasure, joy, grief, loneliness—the whole range of human emotions.
• To inhabit language allows the body the pleasure of being embraced by a self.

The story I mention, ‘Syllables’, is available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford.

That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires.

In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas:

• Ideas emerge from empty space.
• Language organises that space to form selves.
• Selves are the spaces from which new ideas emerge.

Are these selves conscious?

Better to say that the whole space is conscious, the space is consciousness itself.

When language shapes space to create selves, it bequeaths them with a strange gift: the capacity not to know. The capacity to be unconscious. The capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we’re swimming in.

Complex stuff! We may need some help from quantum physics (and a bit of liminal space) to open ourselves to these ideas.

The books I mention in this episode are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe.

The stories I mention, ‘YES/YES’ and ‘The woodcarver’, are available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

What’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way.

To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.

What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?

Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.

In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.

In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:

• When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves
• This ‘bigger thing’ is society
• Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world

These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.

But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.

When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.

This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.

The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.

I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.

The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.

Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Ego angels.’

The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is:

Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press.

It’s available on Internet Archive.

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself?

Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions.

The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think anyone ever truly ‘gets’ anyone else.

Clearly ‘getting’ someone means to ‘understand’ them, but in the same way that you ‘get’ the punchline of a joke. To get a joke means that you have access to all the assumptions on which the joke is based. (In linguistics these are called implicatures.)

But jokes are simple, and people are vast and complex.

And you are not a joke. You are nothing less than a wild, mad-cap, unsolvable mystery. By definition, ungettable.

But that doesn’t stop us from longing to be seen, understood, to feel held, to resonate with someone. To experience that beautiful sense of freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself.

I believe that this longing, this loneliness, is part of the human condition, and I believe that what causes it is language. To illustrate this point, I’ve rewritten my favourite fairy tale, Rapunzel, in a story called ‘Longing’ (which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com).

According to my version of the story, the Earth once had a longing that only the Sorceress, Language, could fulfil.

What could the Earth possibly long for? The natural world is governed by interconnection and symbiosis. How could it possibly be lonely?

What if the Earth longs for longing itself? What if the Earth longs to experience the separateness that can only be experienced by a distinct, isolated self?

In my version of the Rapunzel story, I have the Earth abandon one of its beloved creatures (human beings) to the one magical being that could provide that (language).

Language creates the self.

What the self creates is, precisely, nothing.

If we see the self as a membrane (another of my favourite images), and when we look courageously at what’s inside that membrane, we see... nothing

Nothing we can grasp, nothing we can ‘get’, nothing fathomable.

Just a miraculously fertile void from which new ideas can emerge.

And when those new ideas emerge, we are in the privileged position of seeing them as other.

Like a magical doll in a fairy tale, or a wiser, more compassionate version of ourselves.

The Self and the Other allow us to experience mystery.

And through us, the Earth can experience mystery as well.

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about.

Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydrogen bonds’, and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temperature, which in turn allows life to exist on Earth.

In this episode we explore the possibility that human language has a structuring quality, like the structuring mechanisms in the natural world. If the qualities of water are shaped by hydrogen bonds, what shapes the structure of human language?

I believe that the structuring principle of human language is selfhood.

We’re getting better at recognising the oppressive structures of our society, like structural racism, patriarchal systems, colonialism, cisheteronormativity, neurotypicality and ableism (to name a few).

But we might also take some time to acknowledge a more dynamic structuring principle: the self. Formed and re-formed by language, it dissolves and is produced anew in each moment. The self shapes itself like a membrane around spaces from which new experiences can emerge.

The challenge is to recognise the power of the dynamic structure of the self formed by language. The mission is to honour it, in ourselves and each other.

Curious about how linguists can find out what pre-verbal babies know about linguistic structure? Watch this great video on The Ling Space.

The story I discuss in this episode, ‘No and the ark’ is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language.

Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy.

But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years?

The production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions.

Here’s the link to Dr Debbie Reese’s excellent critique of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-look-at-odells-island-of.html

The book that inspired my fascination with mycelium is Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World.

The stories I discuss in this episode, ‘Finite’ and ‘A remarkable outcome’ are both available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news?

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘A day at the lake’.

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life?

Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means.

Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the ‘meaning of life’ becomes something like the ‘moral of the story’?

What if we thought about meaning of life from a biological perspective?

David Deamer, a biologist who explores the origin of life, gives this definition:

‘Life is an evolving system of polymers synthesized by chemical reactions (metabolism) that take place in membrane-bounded compartments called cells’ (2011, p. 3).

The image we have here is not one life, with one story and one meaning. Instead it’s a proliferation of discrete compartments – cells, surrounded by membranes, each containing its own unique strand of genetic information – in other words, strands of communicable meanings.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I’m fascinated by the idea that the information contained in these membrane-bound compartments... indeed, that the membranes themselves, are a form of language.

This perspective would present human language as nothing more or less than a means for the Earth to produce new forms of membrane-bound compartments, with new forms of information within.

Human language creates the self, which serves as a membrane, that requires us to feel separate, divided, broken.

But it also offers us the experience uniqueness, individuality and the rare pleasure of co-creating something new, something meaningful, something that reconnects us to everything we once felt separate from.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution: rather than spending time trying to find out the meaning of life, let’s celebrate how we each individually contribute to life’s multitude of meanings.

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘The Mosaic Makers’.

Works cited:

Deamer, D. (2011) First life: discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lessing, D. (1979). Shikasta. New York: Knopf.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to the curious, intelligent, creative community who listen to this podcast. I have exciting new things in store for you. Stay tuned to future episodes to find out more.

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Or connect with me in one or more of the following ways:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’

According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How often are they genuinely ‘solved’ by a number?

I’ve often said that my creative and academic work are inspired by ‘the intimacy embedded in the structure of language.’ Intimacy requires selves, and selves are generated by language, by the stories we tell. Stories about the environmental crisis usually construct two distinct selves: us and the Earth.

In this episode we recognise that the relationship between us and the Earth would benefit from some couples therapy. In therapy it might be revealed that the thing that separates us from the Earth is language – the capacity to create and inhabit other worlds – fantasy, parallel existences – that keep us from putting any attention to our partner, the Earth. Language is a boundary that keeps the human species detached from the Earth.

But the thing that separates us does not have to be a boundary. It could be a membrane. Language may be unique to humans, but membranes are universal to all forms of life. Let’s explore the possibility that language is Earth’s newest form of membrane, one that creates spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘The Great Reversal.’

Many thanks to Dr Samantha Kies-Ryan for her work on storytelling and water management in the Solomon Islands.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other.

I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: that they’re both incredibly commonplace, and they’re both overwhelmingly mysterious.

Also, both require boundary making, whether that takes the form of a cell membrane (life) or a self membrane (language). These boundaries cultivate a space in which new ideas can land.

For more about membranes and the origins of life, read Pier Luigi Luisi’s The emergence of life or David Deamer’s First life.

Read my story ‘Wordfall’ on my Grammar for Dreamers blog.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to.

The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘Go’. It’s just been published in the Running Wild Anthology of Stories, vol 5.

I learned about imperatives in Omotic languages from reading work by Alexandra Aikhenvald. (See reference list below.)

And the discussion of postmodernism is based on the following quote from Madan Sarup’s book, Identity, culture and the postmodern world:

‘Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all, in their different ways, decentred the human subject. By “decentering”, I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action.’ (Sarup, 1996, p. 46)

References

Aikhenvald, A. (2010). Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarup, M. (1996). Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world.

The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’.

The hack I mention for finding the subject and verb of a clause is called the question-tag probe. Here’s a video on how to use it to find the subject, and here’s one on how to find the verb.

Have you ever seen a starling murmuration? Watch this video from the RSPB, and be prepared to be amazed (or even, enlightened).

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy.

In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves.

In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of the social structure that emerges from people talking about everyday experiences. I look for grammatical patterns in the transcripts, asking these questions:

• What ‘selves’ are constructed here?
• What is the shape of the social structure here?
• What are the possibilities for transformation here? *

One transformative possibility that has emerged from this type of analysis is that selves need to be protected. Can language protect them?

Think about the work you own name does in constructing your social self. But an anthropological look at naming systems makes it clear that names are less about protecting selfhood, and more about establishing someone’s place in a social structure. Even the seemingly ordinary principle that there are girls’ names for girls and boys’ names for boys, for instance, lets us know that we live in a culture that positions us in a binary gender structure.

Having an established place in a social structure is not the same as knowing that your self is protected, revered, cherished. In my short story, ‘The Greenhouse’, I explore the idea that everything in the natural world has its own blueprint. – its chemical makeup, its DNA signature, etc. Everything in the natural world has something you could call a ‘name’. Or even a ‘self’.

The ‘selves’ are in relationship with each other – molecules combine to form new molecules, membranes form that allow life to emerge

What if the earth were to grant to one of its species the ability to play with these relationship-forming tools?

What if human beings were offered a device to do creativity in exactly the same way the earth does creativity?

Well so far, such a device has created social structures that produce division, hierarchy and exclusion. But there’s hope to be found in the etymology of the word ‘culture’.

Culture is what we cultivate.

Language is what we use to cultivate.

To make a more welcoming social structure, let’s cultivate selves that felt safe and protected, that are crucibles for creation. Let’s use language to form linguistic membranes around selves, create spaces for new experiences, feelings, thoughts and ideas to emerge.

*You can listen to me talk about this in more detail in Episode 58, which is a recording of the talk I gave at Sheffield Hallam University in 2017 in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. For an even more detailed version, have a look at my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds.

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

Follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers

What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?

As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.

In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.

The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.

The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

In this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life.

We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review.

We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf).

We learn from Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic about the role of membranes in the origin of life.

And we hear how Coyote tricked human beings into believing that language started with them, and that they’re the only ones who possess it in my fable called ‘Coyote’s trick’.

We ask this question, which comes from Grammar for Dreamers (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf):

‘What if language was not the endpoint of the earth’s evolution, but rather, its starting point? What if language was what the earth has always been doing?’ (p. 36)

And finally, we explore the flipside of intimacy: hierarchy, domination, colonisation.

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. For additional content, follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers

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

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

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

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:

• the inequitable distribution of resources
• the isolation and marginalisation of difference
• an impulse toward self-destruction, and
• a lack of respect for the natural world.

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:

• Put attention to the social structures produced in tiny strands of grammar
• Recognise any patterns that contribute to self-destruction
• Identify alternative patterns.

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. 

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.

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.

Remember Christina from Episode 7? She’s the one who spared no time at all in getting as far away from Awayville, USA as she could. This week we return to Christina, and we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina’s embarrassed about that, or anything.

Revisiting Christina’s conversation gives me the opportunity to illustrate more specifically how my approach to discourse analysis both draws on and differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). (Episodes 55 and 56 provide a bit of background for this discussion, if you’d like to learn more.)

Get a copy of the transcripts here.

I first offer a CDA-style analysis of Christina’s remarks about Awayville. I’m using the approach to CDA developed in Norman Fairclough’s work (Language and Power is a good introduction) and Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough’s Discourse in Late Modernity.

I explain that a CDA approach would recognise this conversation as a text that was co-produced by three social actors. It might note that Christina’s representation of her hometown in Extract 1 draws upon two discourses – a discourse of socioeconomic pressure and a discourse of ‘rugged individualism’. One effect of her juxtaposing these is that it enables her to ‘blame the victims’. In other words, the people who suffer because of decisions made by local governments are blamed for not getting themselves out of a bad situation.

CDA contributes to social change through its consciousness-raising effects. In the example I’ve given, I’ve encouraged listeners to start paying attention to other texts in which individuals are implicitly blamed for what are, in effect, structural inequalities.

Then I move on to illustrate my own approach to discourse analysis. My perspective on texts is rather different. Instead of seeing texts (conversational, written, performed, etc.) as products of communication processes, I treat them as artefacts that reveal particular ways of structuring information.

I’m looking for patterns in the grammar. Look at this clause, for instance, from Extract 2 (line 1):

• they’re all into Nascars

Now compare it with this clause from lines 4-5:

• my mo:m is all about Nascar

There’s a repetition of grammatical and lexical structure here. The non-repeated elements show how this structure changes. It moves from the general (non-specific, third person plural they) to the unique, in the form of the specific referent, my mo:m.

Also, have a look at the ‘middle-o(f)-nowhere’ towns. These show up in both extracts.

In Extract 1, it takes this form:

• they closed it [the army depot] and so now all these people who live like in the little towns outside like in the middle o(f) nowhere (lines 13-15)

In Extract 2, it looks like this:

• she moved to this little like western North Carolina middle-o(f)-nowhere town and it’s like she belongs there (lines 34-35)

The movement in both clause complexes that mention middle-o(f)-nowhere towns is from a material action process (closed in Extract 1 and moved in Extract 2) to a relational process (live in Extract 1 and belongs in Extract 2). The pattern reveals a type of transformation that has to do with the relationship between people and their local economies and their socioeconomic status.

In the first extract, people only thrive when their local economies thrive – and later we learn it is their responsibility to divest themselves of their low socioeconomic status.

In the second extract, we have an image of an individual who thrives because she moves to an environment that supports and accepts her without requiring her to change her status.

Did you catch that? There’s a moment of transformation there – where we can begin to re-imagine social structure.

The old social structure looks something like this: generic groups of people move in and out of environments which are either supportive or hostile. The environment can change from being supportive to hostile at a moment’s notice, without any regard for the people affected.

The new social structure? An individual moves into a new environment that feels like a good match. The environment shapes itself to embrace this new person, such that she belongs. The individual and the environment are in a mutually beneficial relationship.

My approach to discourse analysis is one that begins by revealing the oppressive social structures that are often masked in discursive configurations. I use the tenets of CDA to help me with that. And then I move on to seek out new social structures – welcomed and welcoming alternatives to these hostile worlds. Where do I find these? In the patterns of the texts themselves.

To engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, and linguists describe the specific ‘design features’ that make human languages different from forms of animal communication. (See George Yule’s textbook, The Study of Language, for a summary.)

I’ve said that my work differs slightly from CDA, one of these differences has to do with my particular take on language. For me, language is not first a foremost a form of communication. (Sperber and Wilson’s book on Relevance Theory is where that idea first sparked for me.) I see language instead as primarily a way of structuring information. And while human beings may be the only creatures who use this structuring device as a mechanism for communication, they are certainly not the only ones who have access to language. Drawing upon Alan Watts’s description of the earth ‘people-ing’, I paint a picture in which the earth has been structuring information for squillions of years, in the form of water molecules, single-celled organisms, mosses, DNA, etc. Human languages represent a new way of structuring information. Not only is it new, it’s also distinct – cut off – it’s a structure that does not allow immediate access to the other information structures the earth has produced. These information structures are stored in texts produced as conversational, written, performed or electronic forms.

Analysing these texts, then, gives us a way of identifying the new possibilities that are emerging from the earth’s new structuring system.

Remember last week when I said that my way of doing CDA is to consider the text as a mid-point, rather than an endpoint? What I meant is that we have the opportunity to explore incipient social structures in their processes of becoming.

And remember when I said CDA can be depressing? Well, my way of doing CDA can be depressing too, especially when you recognise that some of the social structures that are emerging have the power to destroy the earth’s own ecosystems and bring about violence to its inhabitants. But it’s not only a depressing story. Some of the new structures – especially the fleeting ones – offer real promise for more welcoming, integrated new ideas.