In this presentation, I will report on a verbal speech act by dairy cows, namely the cows’ greetings (Duranti, 1997) of humans, machines and conspecifics which is context-situated. Power dynamics and language ideologies prevent farmers from recognizing that ‘their’ cows greet and/or from greeting back. Moreover, cows are severely restricted in their greeting behaviour since within their restricted and encaged space they cannot move to perform ‘close salutations’ through body contact (Mondada, 2018; Schegloff, 1972).
The second part of the presentation will be devoted to methodological problems in conducting fieldwork among intense dairy farms which are linked to debates of animal rights, ownership and the farmers’ attitude as being independent.
This project is part of the animal turn in the posthuman enterprise (Cederholm, 2014; Haraway, 2016) that questions ‘the assumed universality of human experience and asks how and why we draw particular distinctions between humans and other animals (Pennycook, 2018). Language sciences, in particular, contribute(d) deeply to the construction of difference between human and non-human animals. In Western notions of mind and self (Argent, 2012, Meijer, 2017), language is considered as what makes us human. Moreover, power dynamics results in conceiving non-human animals like cows as commodities and property and farmers as owners (Gary & Charlton, 2017:29). These power dynamics strengthen the ideology that human and non-human animal interests and language(s) are not alike. However, as Kulick (2017:373) argues, research into interspecies communication “expands what can count as language, beyond grammar and words” and will challenge the idea that humans are better in language than animals and that animals are deficient language users (see also Meijer, 2017). In a broader context, research into interspecies communication questions our treatment of animals which presents “a range of ethical and political concerns that are deeply interconnected with struggles around neoliberalism, racism, gender equity, forced migration and many other forms of discrimination and inequality” (Pennycook 2018: 3, see also Pedersen, 2014).
Leonie Cornips er professor på The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) i Amsterdam og på universitetet i Maastricht. Leonie har bidratt med et betydelig forskningsarbeid innafor feltene sosiolingvistikk (variasjon og språkkultur), språktilegnelse og syntaktisk variasjon. De seinere åra har hun også bidratt til å utvikle forskningsfeltet på såkalt super-lingvistikk, mer spesifikt intra-/interspecies communication.
Zoom-lenke: hiof.zoom.us/j/65266656738?pwd=V3VodHp5VS92L3lROHpQZ1RXbzhndz09