Presentation at Dept of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy annual Graduate Research Day May, 2013

1. Why Linguistics?
Clive Forrester
Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
York University

2. What do linguists do?

3. We tape record…

4. We romanticize data…

5. We plant “trees”…

6. What linguists DON’T do

7. We don’t study all
languages…

8. We don’t have a free pass
to the UN…

9. And we wont proofread
your dissertation

10. Settling for linguistics…

11. … “settling” for teaching?

12. Three main areas
 Critical language studies in the Caribbean
 Communication and society
 The linguist as the public intellectual

13. Critical language studies
and the Caribbean
 The study of language as the quintessential
human trait
 An investigation of power, privilege and the
nature (and trajectory) of changing language
attitudes in post-colonial Caribbean
 Critical analysis of negative language
attitudes and underdevelopment in the
region

14. Communication and
society
 Society has a healthy distrust of scientists
and “experts”
 The language “problem” only makes sense
to the public if it is problematized
 Linguist is needed to communicate
conclusions of research from the academy to
the public

15. Linguist as public
intellectual
The influence of the linguist has to
move beyond the confines of the
institution of necessity

20. Just friends, 2007
Something
more, 2010