Tomayto Tomahto

By: Talia Sherman
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  • Summary

  • I say tomayto, but you say tomahto. Why? What cognitive, economic, racial, or social factors led you to say tomahto and I tomayto? How did you acquire the ability to produce and perceive coherent sentences? These are some questions that linguists attempt to answer scientifically. Led by Talia Sherman, a Brown University undergrad, this podcast explores language: what it is, how it works (both cognitively and in practice), and its relationship to politics, history, law, pedagogy, AI, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, critical theory, and more!
    Talia Sherman
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Episodes
  • A Raciolinguistic Perspective with Jonathan Rosa

    A Raciolinguistic Perspective with Jonathan Rosa
    Oct 14 2024
    "What frame allows you to take seriously the consequence of ideological overdetermination without conceding that it has a reality or a natural position?” This is one of many questions that Jonathan Rosa poses throughout this episode. What perspective allows us to see race and language as ontologically overdetermined without essentializing that overdetermination to the point of inextricability? Taking a few steps back, this episode is largely about questions and questioning. Why have certain fields maintained the practice of using race as a variable, thereby stabilizing the idea of race? Whose interests are served by entrenching the categories of race, ethnicity, and so on? Through discussion of a raciolinguistic perspective and its reception, raciontology and ontological overdetermination, and critique of power in general, this episode centers around hierarchies of the human and the problems that humans are made into based on their particular position within hierarchies. Rather than viewing race, ethnicity, disability, (fill in the blank), as intersectional phenomena, Jonathan asks that we move instead towards thinking of identity as a process of interconnection, and question the goal of intersectionality as a framework. For me, this all comes down to a rather unsettling problem: what if the inequities, pernicious ideologies, and their enabling structural frameworks aren't dismantled but rather perpetrated through the academic inquiry that originally sought to obliterate them? And what if that academic inquiry still purports to serve a remedial, ameliorative function? What then? This isn't to say everything is a paradox; this is to say that paradoxes abound. Description can become prescription. So if nothing else, I invite you to struggle through the frustration of irony. I invite you to squirm at the failures of academic inquiry and hegemonic ideas which have prevailed for quite some time. But hopefully we'll get to better questions and answers, and perhaps better ways of failing. Jonathan Rosa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. He is the author of a terrific book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race. I recommend reading it. Jonathan Rosa Stanford profile, all publications Kesha Fikes The Viral Underclass by Steven Thrasher Beyond Yellow English: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America Angela Reyes' Language and Ethnicity Wesley Leonard Black Skin, White Masks Ana Celia Zentella's Puerto Rican Code Switching Labov's '4th Floor' Study Michael Berman's Toward a Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Listening Josh Babcock's Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 2: Optimality Theory and the Tapestry of Law

    Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 2: Optimality Theory and the Tapestry of Law
    Jun 29 2024

    While legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics, it has been estranged (until now) from the practice of adopting linguistic theory and methods. In Part 2 of our conversation, Alex Walker and I discuss the implications of applying optimality theory (OT) to law. By utilizing the formalism of OT, Alex argues our entire legal system and conceptualization of law will change for the better. Rather than conceptualizing law as a set of rules, Alex argues we should view law as a tapestry of ordered preferences. For example, during the 51 years that Roe v. Wade dictated the “rules,” anti-abortion laws were never repealed or struck down, they were simply suppressed. Our system has never been about any given rule, but rather about the multitude of preferences continually shifting in their hierarchy. From AI judges to forum shopping, OT has something to offer the legal system both practically and Platonically.

    Somewhat ironically—perhaps paradoxically—I’ve found that the application of OT to law pushes legal questions further away from linguistic ones. If law is about consequences and outcomes and why those outcomes exist, then it’s not really about the semantic change of a singular noun or the bounds of an entailment condition, right? And if law’s fulcrum isn’t language, then perhaps our legal outcomes—our laws, current precedent, and so on—shouldn’t be predicated upon questions of linguistics or deontological “rules.” But in order to come to that conclusion, perhaps we need the formalism of a linguistic theory.

    Watch a short video on optimality theory here

    Read about optimality theory

    Alex Walker’s website

    Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins

    Asking ChatGPT for the Ordinary Meaning of Statutory Terms

    Stare Decisis

    The history of Arizona’s Civil War-era Abortion Ban

    Center for Law, Brain & Behavior

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    45 mins
  • Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 1: Dialectal Due Process

    Language and Law w/ Alex Walker: Part 1: Dialectal Due Process
    Jun 21 2024

    Legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics. After all, law is, in some sense, a linguistic construction. But our entire legal system interfaces with language far more than we might think. For a long time, the relationship between linguistics and law has concentrated on philosophy of language and forensic linguistics. Lawyers and linguists become friends over debates about entailment conditions or Constitutional arguments predicated upon the semantic change of a singular noun (arms, anyone?). But Alex Walker (the current Rappaport Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School), works not at the intersection of linguistic structure and the law, but rather on the legal system's reception of linguistic utterances. In Saussurean terms, this is about parole, not langue.

    In Part 1 of our conversation, Alex explains his work on linguistic discrimination in the legal system. Why are some voices unable to be heard properly in courtrooms? What is Dialectal Due Process and how will its implementation improve the situation? While linguistic prejudice and misinterpretation are ubiquitous, the consequences can be graver when someone can’t be understood on a witness stand as opposed to a job interview. That's a key part of this conversation: the ideas discussed here closely resemble ideas and concepts discussed in the past by sociolinguists. What's different is the methodology. As a legal scholar, Alex is interested in proposing policy and legal frameworks (backed-up by philosophical, economic, and historical arguments) to address problems that are not inherently linguistic, but rather instantiated through language. Racism won't be eradicated through linguistic justice alone, and linguistic justice won't solve the problem of mass incarceration, either. This is about making sure all people are understood and respected—linguistically and legally.

    As always, it was an honor to interview someone so committed to interdisciplinary scholarship. The questions I ask and the arguments he offers are nothing if not legal—litigious, even—but they are concerned with language. And if all people are to be taken seriously in legal contexts, we need to hear them first.

    Alex Walker's website

    Publications

    Black English for Lawyers

    Rappaport Fellowship


    Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)
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    41 mins

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