The document discusses several key points about the nature of signs and language: - Signs have no natural connection to the real world and are arbitrary, which allows them to be appropriated by discourse communities. Native speakers may feel signs have natural meanings due to cultural immersion. - Political and historical symbols take on simplified meanings through repeated use over time, shaping users' memories and conferring mythical weight. Cultural stereotypes also become frozen signs that affect both users and subjects. - Signs establish semantic and pragmatic relationships with other signs based on direct exchanges and broader discourse contexts. Coherence is created through inferences between speakers rather than being inherent. - The arbitrariness of signs gives language its power as

5. THE NON-ARBITRARY NATURE OF SIGNS
• The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is humans' capacity to create signs
that mediate between them and their environment.
• Signs have no natural connection with the outside world and are therefore arbitrary. It is
precisely this arbitrariness that makes them so amenable to appropriation.
• It is precisely this arbitrariness that makes them so amenable to appropriation by members of
culturally embedded discourse communities. Speakers and writers use those signs
• Native speakers do not feel in their body that words are arbitrary signs. For example, anyone
brought up in a French household willswear that there is a certain natural masculinity about the
sun.
• For example, words like 'democracy', 'freedom', 'choice', when uttered by politicians and
diplomats, may lose much of their denotative and even their rich connotative meanings, and
become political symbolsin Western democratic rhetoric; signifiers like'the French Revolution',
'May 68', 'the Holocaust', have simplified an originally confusing amalgam of historical events
into conventionalized symbols. The recurrence of these symbols over time creates an
accumulation of meaning that not only shapes the memory of sign users but confers to these
symbols mythical weight and validity.

7. • Cultural stereotypes are frozen signs that affect both those who use them and those whom they
serve to characterize. Much of what we call ideology is, in this respect, symbolic language.
• Signs establish semantic relations (Part of linguistics that studies the meaning of linguistic
expressions) with other signs in the direct environment of verbal exchanges, or in the historical
context of a discourse community.
• Pragmatics, part of linguistics that studies language in its relationship with users and the
circumstances of communication.

8. Coherence is not given in speakers' utterances, it is created in the minds of speakers and hearers by the
inferences they make based on the words they hear. Thus, whereas semantic cohesion relates word to word,
pragmatic coherence relates speaker to speaker within the larger cultural context of communication.

10. LINGUICIDE

11. Mario Vargas LLosa expressed his position on inclusive
language, whose argumentation can be summarized in the
following points:
• discrimination against women cannot be denied and this
must be corrected;
• Inclusive language is an aberration that will not solve the
problem;
• languages change freely; and
• you should not force your tongue and avoid excesses that can
be risible.

12. Do you remember this?

13. Code switching:
• Situations will determine the code we use.
• Check the examples:

15. Chomsky:
remember him?
He talks about language universals:
• Characteristic they share
• Rules
• Principles
Chomsky talks about: competence and performance (1965)

17. Yea, It's 50, A.K.A. Ferrari, F-50, break it down
I got a lot of living, to do before I die
And I ain't got time to waste. Let's make it (Fifty Cent)
No manches
When a friend tells you about some amazing event, or
something that you don’t know if it’s real or not, you would
say No manches! (Really? or Are you kidding?).
You can also use ¡No mames! which means the same
thing, but is a little more colourful (similar to damn!).

19. The linguistics expert Dan Everett, who spent many years among the Pirahã, tells of
a group of men killing a very sick baby by pouring copious amounts of alcohol in its
mouth. He explained: “They felt certain that this baby was going to die. They felt it
was suffering terribly [. . .] So they euthanized the child.”

21. Spoken language, oral culture

22. It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to experience what members of exclusively oral cultures must
have experienced before the invention of writing; the very term orality is defined over against the
written word and was coined by literate people within a context of literacy. Even illiterate people
nowadays live in a world whose consciousness has been totally transformed by the advent of writing
and, later, of print. Primary orality, then, can never be recovered.

24. Speech is transient, rather than permanent. Written language, by contrast, can be stored, retrieved, and recollected,
and responses can be delayed. Written language carries more weight and hence more prestige.
Speech is additive or 'rhapsodic'. By contrast, the information conveyed in writing is hierarchic-ally ordered within the
clause structure, and is linearly arranged on the page, from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom, according to the
cultural convention.
Speech is aggregative, writing has come to be viewed as the medium that fosters analysis, logical reasoning and
abstract categorization.
Speech is redundant. By contrast, since written language doesn't have to make such demands on short-term memory, it
tends to avoid redundancy.
Speech is loosely structured grammatically and is lexically sparse; writing, by contrast, is grammatically compact and
lexically dense.

25. Speech tends to be people-centered, writing tends to be topic-centered.
Speech, being close to the situation at hand, is context dependent; writing, being received far from its
original context of production, is context-reduced. Because of the

26. Plato thought that there had to be a reality behind "the world of the senses," and he called this
reality the world of Ideas. Here it is where the eternal and immutable "model images“ are, behind
the different phenomena that we come across in nature. We call this spectacular concept Plato's
Theory of Ideas.

28. Cave paintings
• Paintings were a record of
seasonal migration
• Paintings related to hunting
(motivation-ritual)
• Animals painted on walls depict
mythical significance (shamans
using animals’ head)

29. Print language, literate culture
WRITTEN LANGUAGE,TEXTUAL CULTURE
• The culture of the text, as exemplified in the Chinese scribal culture, passed on its wisdom
not through reading, but through the faithful copying of texts.
• Something similar occurs with the Ecuadorian Indigenous Culture.
• The culture of the text and its respect for and obedience to textual authority was also
central to the Judaic and early Christian traditions.
• Bible (Occidental logic) vs Torah (Kabbalah)
• Writing permits record-keeping, and thus can be an aid to memory; by fixing the fluidity of
speech, it makes tradition into scripture, which can then be easily codified and made into a
norm, a canon, or a law.
• Ancient texts can only be understood though the multiple meanings given to them by
latter-day commentators, exegetes, translators.
PRINT AND POWER
• In medieval times, monks, scribes, and commentators served as the gate-keepers and
interpreters of tradition against cultural change.
• The combination of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press around 1440, and the
translation of the Bible into vernacular German by Martin Luther in 1522, made the sacred
truths accessible to all, and not only to the Church-educated elite. It opened the door to
the unlimited and uncontrolled

30. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF LITERACY
• Oral cultures (with little or no use of writing) and literate cultures (with a fuller
utilization of writing and print)
• To be literate means not only to be able to encode and decode the written word,
or to do exquisite text analyses; it is the capacity to understand and manipulate the
social and cultural meanings of print language in thoughts, feelings, and actions.
• To construct an argument according to the logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or
problem-evidence-solution, to respond to 'what' and 'why' questions.
• Other types of literacies are required, that schools traditionally do not impart.
• Indigenous, Africans, etc., different from those of mainstream Anglo-American
society.
• Children from other ethnicities resist adopting Anglo-Saxon schooling practices
that expect them.

31. National Identity
vs Cultural
identity

32. Families
• National identity may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation,
regardless of one's legal citizenship status. The expression of one's national identity seen in a positive light
is patriotism which is characterized by national pride and positive emotion of love for one's country.
• Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-conception and
self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of
social group that has its own distinct culture.
• In 2004, France banned the wearing of veils by Muslim students in state schools. A French law that took effect
in April 2011 prohibits women from going to public sites with their faces covered by a veil. In a Parisian
suburb, two French youths of North African heritage were electrocuted on October 27, 2005, when they ran into
a power substation while escaping from the police. Their deaths triggered a series of riots in French suburbs
that lasted for almost three weeks.
• Muslim youths in France have a difficult time attaining a French identity and believe that most White French
citizens do not view them as French.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTvt1C0bwqA

33. • Internalized oppression works to ensure that oppressed people will accept their social positioning within the
existing social structure in which whites claim power and privilege as their inalienable right.
• Successful Latinxs who experience internalized oppression question their abilities, feel like frauds, and fear being
outed as incompetent (Medina and Luna 2000).
• The problem lies in the hierarchy of knowledge systems where one system is recognized, utilized, celebrated, and
expected whereas the other is denied or erased. These broadly defined “American” ideologies and practices
were imposed.
• “American” values for individualism and independence (Bellah et al. 1985) were explicitly and implicitly taught in
the schools.
• Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a philosophy of praxis that seeks to transform our current capitalist world (and
the antagonisms it creates) into one that is class free, where labor becomes a creative endeavor beyond
necessity and for the benefits of the entire society (Allman 1999; McLaren 2012).
• The alternative to capitalism involves true democracy where individual desires are not in direct competition with
those of the rest of society and everyone’s voice counts.
• […] la preservación de las lenguas y culturas indígenas ha sido más un objetivo de ciertos agentes externos como
los etno-lingüistas, la Iglesia progresista y la izquierda, y de algunos líderes indígenas, que un deseo de los
indígenas de base (Martínez, 2009, p. 192).
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24SqeMc0O_w

34. • People who experience failed citizenship may also be more likely than structurally integrated individuals to accept and be
victimized by the propaganda of extremist groups such as White nationalist groups and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS).
• Assimilationist scholars argue that educators should develop students’ national identities and not their cultural or ethnic
identities. (Aculturation)
• Kymlicka (1995), Young (2000), Gutmann (2004), and Ladson-Billings (2004) indicate that students from cultural, ethnic,
linguistic, and religiously diverse communities will find it difficult to develop strong commitments and identities with the
nation-state if it does not reflect and incorporate important aspects of their ethnic and community cultures.
• Sleeter (2011) concluded that “there is considerable research evidence that well designed and welltaught ethnic studies
curricula have positive academic and social outcomes for students”

35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miINTEHNMPs

36. Tolerance = Moral Values

38. CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY

39. All cultures ought to be equally revered

40. How many cultures can
you enumerate?

41. Theonomous culture. Theos meaning God and nomos meaning law. The idea in a
theonomous culture is that God’s law is so self-evident within the human heart that
there are some imperatives within you that find a consensus in society.
Heteronomous culture can be found in the Middle East. Heteros meaning different
and nomos meaning law, a different law, where there are two distinct sets in
operation. There is the controlling few and the masses down here. In secular
terminology Marxism is a heteronomous culture where the handful at the top dictate
everything for the masses below.
Autonomous culture can be found in the Western world; autos meaning self, nomos
meaning law, you’re a self-law. You’re a law unto yourself. You follow your individual
autonomy.

49. Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural
misappropriation, is the adoption of an element or elements of
one culture by members of another culture.

55. Western logic is different from ancestral logic

56. READING IMAGES OF OTHERS
• In everyday life, we are often separated from other ethnic groups by boundaries
that are not only physical and geographical but also social, economic and
cultural.
• Skin colour, clothing, location and cultural practices are at times used as an
‘Identikit’ to exclude, single out, scapegoat, even to murder and ethnically
‘cleanse’ or, conversely, to find allegiance with and to celebrate (perhaps
superficially) as a paean of multiculturalism.
• Boundaries are socially drawn and may be redrawn, heightened or lowered and,
in some instances, crossed.

57. WHAT IS THE OTHER?
• The Other represents an area of consensus, a way of delineating self, and the shared
values of our culture or subculture.
• Some of the complex negotiated views that form our self-identity derive from the
media’s images of ‘others’ as well as images of ourselves as we would aspire to be.
• ‘The only real contact with others is, paradoxically, symbolic, and rendered in the form
of stories, both factual and fictional’.
• Media interests and advertising revenues often imply an agenda constrained by
political and economic forces (see Herman and Chomsky 1995).

59. Consider words that we commonly use to designate other peoples, such as Asians, Arabs,
Caribbean, Europeans. These terms generalise and obscure differences. When does it become
necessary to use more specific terms and why? What is the possible impact on your identity to
be subsumed under an umbrella term?

61. SHIFTING MEANINGS OF RACE

63. Monogenism
• It or sometimes monogenesis is the theory of human origins which posits a
common descent for all human races.
• The monogenistic theory of human origin explains that the human being as we
know him today has a unique and common origin. This theory reveals that Africa
was the place where Homo sapiens originated; from there they began to migrate
in several waves to different parts of the world.
• There was a desire to eradicate the anomalous areas and gaps on the Great
Chain.
• God’s creations were set out in layers from the infernal regions below the Earth,
to the lowliest terrestrial life, to animals, birds, humanity, and above them to
celestial beings, to God the Father.

64. Polygenism
• Polygenism is a theory about the origins of man that postulates the existence of
different lineages for the human races. Some of its defenders derive their
postulates from scientific bases and others from pseudoscientific or religious
bases. It is opposed to the dominant theory in anthropology, which is
monogenism.
• Linnaeus in his book entitled General System of Nature (1806) established four
basic colour types in descending order:
 White Europeans
 Red Americans
 Yellow Asians
 Black Africans.
• A century later, these categories and the ready stereotypical traits were
apparently accepted and commonplace.
• William Petty proposed that ‘savages were a permanently distinct and inferior
species of humanity located between (white) men and animals on the Great
Chain’
• A major error was to assume that the human species was clearly divided into
subgroups, such as sub-species.

65. Evolutionism
• Ideas about evolution did not begin with Darwin. Aristotle and Herbert Spencer
(1820–1903)
• Darwin suggested implied that change was more random and accidental than pre-
ordained.
• Baron Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom (1890), which portray the human race are divided
into four categories: American Indian, Caucasian, Mongol and Negro.
• Most Social Darwinists were, therefore, against improving the conditions of the poor.
To let nature run its course was considered best, as natural equilibrium would
eventually result.
• Francis Galton, used his ideas to promote Social Darwinism and eugenics.

66. RACE AND CLASS
A more Marxist interpretation suggests that race is a relationship to the means of production.
RACE AS CULTURE
Race, from a culturalist viewpoint (such as that espoused by Stuart Hall), is a series of shifting and
unfinished points of identification.
It is here that the concept of ethnicity seems to overlap with this discourse of race
ETHNICITY
Ethnicity has come to be generally used as a term for collective cultural identity.
Ethnicity has become the preferred used term to avoid ‘race’ and its implications of a discredited
‘scientific’ racism.
RACE AS ETHNICITY
the term ‘ethnicity’ can be another manifestation of the dominant culture marginalising
minority groups in its midst.