Lakoff and The Lone Ranger

I heard Robin Lakoff speak today. There is always something fascinating about meeting someone you have read and cited. I did not imagine her to be the perfect combination of funny, passionate, humble, and creative that she proves to be in person. Lakoff's work is brilliant, yet she doesn't make it a solemn business. She began by telling us about the Lone Ranger, brought up Humpty Dumpty half-way through the lecture, and ended with a New Yorker cartoon.

One statement she made that I particularly enjoyed was her explanation of linguists' relationship to science. That, perhaps more than any researchers of social sciences, linguists want to be white-lab coat scientists. However, language, what we study, will always include an “erosion of boundaries and quarrels over definitions.” This, she says, makes quantification a tricky and often false business in linguistics (she then admitted that counting has never been very important to her; she said she could count to 20 today, since she was wearing sandles).

Lakoff claims human minds have this dichotomy: constantly seeking categories, and conditions/rules, wanting to separate and define things, while at the same time needing to acknowledge the connections, relationships, and overlaps that are inherent in language. The tug of war reminded me of what Lakoff (1973) was one of the first to highlight happens in social interaction (along with Goffman (1967)): We are at once in need of privacy and independence while craving connectivity with others. Every relationship we negotiate, each conversation we have with others, is a balancing of these two conflicting desires (to tie this back into my own research interests, I believe this is what is responsible for the phenomenon of quitting and rejoining Facebook, or using the site but complaining about privacy settings: people have opposing needs for both distance from and intimacy with others)

Lakoff, by the way, is responsible for the foundations of Politeness Theory (which is usually credited to Brown and Levinson, who was Lakoff's student.)

The talk today was entitled, "Whaddya mean 'We,' Paleface?"  (a reference from The Lone Ranger) and was on indexicals.