The Relevance of Husserl's Theory to Language Socialization

Abstract

This article suggests that the theory of language socialization could benefit from adopting some key concepts originally introduced by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the first part of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's notion of “(phenomenological) modification,” to be understood as a change in “the natural attitude” that humans have toward the phenomenal world, their own actions included. After providing examples of different kinds of modifications in interpreting language and listening to music, Husserl's notion of “theoretical attitude” (a modification of “the natural attitude”) is introduced and shown to be common in adult conversations as well as in interactions between adults and young children. A reanalysis of an exchange previously examined by Platt (1986) between a Samoan mother and her son is provided to show the benefits of an integration of phenomenological and interactional perspectives on adult‐child discourse. Finally, it is suggested that the failure sometimes experienced by children and adults to adopt new ways of being may be due to the accumulated effects of modifications experienced earlier in life which make it difficult if not impossible to retrieve earlier, premodificational ways of being. [language socialization, phenomenology, jazz aesthetics, Samoan child language]

Narrative Modalities, Identity and the (Re)contextualisation of Self in Teacher Education in Papua New Guinea

“…This is Marcus's metadiscourse, the discourse he draws on to encode a new image of himself and an emerging self-consciousness seeking a basis in the social world of schooling (e.g., "Teacher has to be a person who can socialise with others"). This is not, however, a narrative modality that hinges on exploring and revising circumstances; rather, its architecture reflects the oral ideology of ethnonarrative and the way in which aspects of the embodied self are bound to what is socially and culturally valued (Duranti, 2009). For Marcus, recontextualising oneself is a matter of social relationships, alignments, and affiliations-seeing oneself as another (to borrow from Ricoeur, 1992) through an empathetic sociality.…”

Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition

“…In fact, many sociologists and anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s built much of their work on the phenomenological foundations in order to investigate the emerging nature of everyday interaction (e.g., Goffman 1959;Garfinkel 1967;Cicourel 1973), and such a tradition persistently continues in current investigations (Habermas 2001;Csordas 2008;Gillespie & Cornish 2009;Duranti 2009Duranti , 2010. 2 Duranti (2010), for instance, defines it in plain terms and argues for its renewed importance in language and communication studies as follows:…”

Intermediary Varieties of Experience

“…Very often, what we take to be distinctions between subjective and objective aspects of experience are for Husserl the result of acts of phenomenological modification that are implicated in foregrounding some aspects of the stream of experience, while backgrounding others (see Duranti 2009;Throop forthcoming).…”