"The Treatment of Animals in Linguistics"
Alison Rotha Moore, University of Wollongong
1. As any first-year linguistics student can tell you, the question of whether non-human animals have language is considered asked and answered (e.g. Bauer 2012, Fromkin et al 2021, Yule 1983/2020, all of which rely heavily on the work of Hockett 1960).
2. Based on a meta-analysis of 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten by humans globally, Oxford scholars Poore and Nemecek (2018: 5) suggest that one of the most significant things we could do to reduce GHG emissions is to switch to a diet that excludes animal products.
3. Mother cows separated from calves can grieve audibly for days, signalling to humans their disagreement and distress (Adams 2018, Boyde 2018). These noises are sometimes heard as worrying by nearby human residents but within the industry cows mooing is more routinely dismissed either as not grief or as insignificant (Boyde 2018, Gaard 2013, Gillespie 2018).
What is the connection between these statements? And what is their relevance for linguistics and social semiotics? These are questions I am pursuing as part of a joint project with Daniel Lees Fryer and I will explore them in this talk. In the first part of the talk I’ll discuss how linguistic and semiotic thinking has positioned animals and animality; in the second part I’ll present some critical discourse work that aims, ultimately, to transform the lives of non-human animals and their relations with us humans.
References:
Adams, C. 2018. Provocations from the field, Female reproductive exploitation comes home.Animal Studies Journal 7(2): 1-8.
Bauer, L. 2012. Beginning Linguistics. Palgrave.
Boyde, M. 2018. Practicing the art of war. Animal Studies Journal 7(2): 9-24.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., Hyams, N. Collins, P., Amberber, M. and Cox, F. 2012. Introduction to Language. Cengage.
Gaard, G (2013). Toward a feminist postcolonial milk studies. American Quarterly 65 (3): 595–618. Special Issue on Race, Gender, Species.
Gillespie, K. (2018). The cow with ear tag #1389. University of Chicago.
Hockett, C. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203(3): 88–96. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0960‐88.
Poore, J. and Nemecek, T. 2018. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science 360 (6392): 987-992.
Yule, G. 2020. The study of language. Cambridge University Press.