Linguistic Agency

the fruition of my thesis, a global pandemic hit, and I simultaneously faced hardships at home. You gave me the space I needed to focus on myself as well as the push I needed to get back into doing what I love: academia! You give me the verbal affirmations I need to believe in myself and the firmness to stay on task. I am so grateful for you. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Lindsey Meeks and Dr. John Banas. Dr. Meeks, thank you so much for your patience as I navigate my personal life and grow as a scholar. You inspire me to continue examining the political structures that silence marginalized communities -specifically around sex and gender. Dr. Banas (and Dr. Bessarabova), thank you so much for introducing me to social influence and persuasion! When I stopped by Burton Hall before applying to the University of Oklahoma, and we had a chance to talk about the communication processes I found interesting from my past marketing job, I had no idea I'd stick with social influence. You recognized the area I was interested in before I did. I hope to continue working with all three of you on future research projects. I'd also like to thank my partner, Brandie, and brother, Kevin, as well as my wonderful friends. Brandie, you support my dreams more than I can put into words. I'm so happy to have found someone who both motivates me to be everything I want to be and calms me when I feel overwhelmed. Kevin, you have always been my teammate. Thank you for your unconditional love and for letting me borrow money when times get tough! Your drive inspires me every day. Lastly, I want to thank my friends/colleagues, Dr. Natalie Daugherty and Juliana Barbati. Natalie, thank you so much for your continuous listening ear and advice in regard to all my v worries about school, work/life balance, and everything! Juliana, thank you for giving me so many tips in teaching, reading articles, and navigating my thesis. You have been a constant area of support in my program. I appreciate each and every single one of you so much! vi Acknowledgements .

the fruition of my thesis, a global pandemic hit, and I simultaneously faced hardships at home. You gave me the space I needed to focus on myself as well as the push I needed to get back into doing what I love: academia! You give me the verbal affirmations I need to believe in myself and the firmness to stay on task. I am so grateful for you. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Lindsey Meeks and Dr. John Banas. Dr. Meeks, thank you so much for your patience as I navigate my personal life and grow as a scholar. You inspire me to continue examining the political structures that silence marginalized communities -specifically around sex and gender. Dr. Banas (and Dr. Bessarabova), thank you so much for introducing me to social influence and persuasion! When I stopped by Burton Hall before applying to the University of Oklahoma, and we had a chance to talk about the communication processes I found interesting from my past marketing job, I had no idea I'd stick with social influence. You recognized the area I was interested in before I did. I hope to continue working with all three of you on future research projects. I'd also like to thank my partner, Brandie, and brother, Kevin, as well as my wonderful friends. Brandie, you support my dreams more than I can put into words. I'm so happy to have found someone who both motivates me to be everything I want to be and calms me when I feel overwhelmed. Kevin, you have always been my teammate. Thank you for your unconditional love and for letting me borrow money when times get tough! Your drive inspires me every day. Lastly, I want to thank my friends/colleagues, Dr. Natalie Daugherty and Juliana Barbati. Natalie, thank you so much for your continuous listening ear and advice in regard to all my v worries about school, work/life balance, and everything! Juliana, thank you for giving me so many tips in teaching, reading articles, and navigating my thesis. You have been a constant area of support in my program. I appreciate each and every single one of you so much! vi Acknowledgements .

We propose the term illness personification (ILL-PERF) as an organizing theme shedding light on the ways individuals live with, under, and outside of chronic physical illness. Drawing from multiple theoretical sources-object relations theory, socialcognitive theory, existential phenomenology and neuroscience-as well as from our own research program on chronic pain and systemic lupus erothemathosis (LSE), we argue that individual differences in the tendency to ascribe human characteristics to physical illness play an important risk/resilience role in illness-related disability and emotional distress. We then describe the way ILL-PERF might be incorporated into extant-and integrative-treatments of chronic physical illness.

People suffering from pain often express their experience in metaphor. Empirical research suggests that the metaphors they use may shed light on their adjustment to pain conditions. While linguistic agency and pain metaphors often co-occur, no study has examined how people assign agency when describing pain and the impact of agency assignment on message receivers’ perceptions and responses. This research investigated 1) patterns of linguistic agency assignment in individuals’ descriptions of pain differing in intensity and duration, and 2) the impact of linguistic cues (i.e., agency assignment and grammatical category) used in fictitious pain narratives on audience’s pain perception. Two studies are reported. Study 1 investigated the language people spontaneously use to articulate their experience of mild vs. severe and acute vs. chronic pain. The author hypothesized that participants would be more likely to assign agency to pain or body parts where pain is localized (e.g., back) when describing chronic and/or severe pain than when describing acute and/or mild pain. As predicted, pain/body agency assignment rate was higher in the chronic vs. acute pain condition. However, there was no significant difference in the pain/body agency assignment rate between the severe and mild pain conditions. Study 2 featured a 3 (pain location: back, head, or joint) × 2 (agency assignment: person or pain/body) × 2 (pain process encoding: verb or nominalization) factorial experimental design. Participants read a pain narrative differing in linguistic cues and then rated their perception of the speaker and their pain. Findings from univariate analyses of covariance indicated that pain/body agency predicted higher ratings of perceived pain intensity and duration and lower ratings of internal locus of control and pain responsibility than human
agency. However, no significant effect of agency assignment and nominalization were found on perceived pain affect, pain-related disability, sympathy, and support for higher dose. Pain perception was also subjected to individual differences in medical expertise, personal pain history, and experience of caretaking. This research offers insight to
researchers and healthcare professionals about the influence of various linguistic choices in pain description on others’ interpretation of sufferers’ experience and their subsequent reactions.

The use-mention distinction is elaborated into a four-way distinction between use, formal mention, material mention and pragmatic mention. The notion of pragmatic mention is motivated through the problem of monsters in Kaplanian indexical semantics. It is then formalized and applied in an account of schemata in formalized languages.

Since the end of World War II, linguistics has been primarily informed by one single dominating theoretical model of language, which is cognitivist at its core. As a trickle-down effect, the same happened for fields such as Second Language Acquisition and L2 Education. Within these fields, however, many problems and practical implementation issues have gradually emerged: while in SLA research, for example, Larsen-Freeman (2007) pointed out the limitations imposed by what she calls a “narrow perspective […] adopted thus far in the field”, in second language education the Communicative Language Teaching paradigm — that has imposed itself in the last decades — is still recognized as “only partially implemented” (Jacobs and Farrel 2003). These issues all root back and can be attributed to the ontological perspective that has been so far adopted over the concepts of language, learning, and cognition, and they ultimately reverberate on teaching practices and learners’ results.
In order to overcome this impasse, second language education needs a full reboot, which passes through a reconceptualization of what learning a language actually means, educating learners to an holistic approach that goes well beyond grammar and communicative tasks: power, agency, identity, and metacognition are the new focus upon which to concentrate.
Sociocognitive linguistics offers an excellent alternative theoretical basis to Chomskyan linguistics in terms of theory of language. A consequential alternative theory of learning is therefore proposed here, finally providing these two theoretical pillars (theory of language and of learning) necessary to language pedagogy to set itself free from the doldrums in which it has become stranded.
Hacker ethics and open source software development dynamics, finally, offer a viable model to follow in order to operate this reboot, indicating the right direction to take and offering a concrete roadmap to the language learners and educators of the twenty-first century.

PÉREZ-RODRÍGUEZ, Paula."Inestabilidad y agencia lingüística. Poesía, pueblo y opacidad". L/E/N/G/UA/J/E/o: Dispositivo transatlántico de publicación & republicación de textos del Seminario Euraca. Septiembre 2017 (1), Madriz.

Este texto es una versión/transcripción de mi participación en una mesa redonda sobre lenguaje y política ( (La Morada de Podemos, 23/05/2016) en la que se presentaba el libro «Una historia política del Español» (José del Valle, coord.). La intervención trató de explicar los principales nodos teóricos que, en relación a las ideas de lengua y pueblo hemos trabajo en el Seminario Euraca. Entre ellos: opacidad y transparencia, inestabilidad de la lengua (vs. estabilidad del alfabeto normativo), agencia lingüística.

This article examines the well-known though contested stance of Elaine Scarry regarding the inability to express our pain. Reviewing the problem shows that certain practices (scientific, judicial, medical) communicate the pain objectively. But when transmitting our pain becomes challenging, one important solution is found in Scarry’s suggested use of linguistic agents. These agents represent the felt pain, whether in actual (a stabbing nail, an electric shock) or imaginative forms (‘like a ball that keeps falling down on you’), enabling us to convey an otherwise unconceivable torturous experience. As elements distinguished from the hurting body, they create a spatial separation that produces the necessary distance for safely projecting the pain on to something other than oneself. Historians strongly criticize Scarry’s ‘ontological’ account, but in drawing on experimental laboratory work for discussing this reality-conferring function of language, the article addresses clinicians, neuroscientists, and healthcare workers in order to expose new perspectives for pain research.