Perspective d'une étudiante de M1 sur les communications

“Humans outrank any other entity - or do they?”

 Marlène de Palma

Université Grenoble Alpes, France

2017

For the first year of my Master’s degree I attended an international conference about Egocentrism and Anthropocentrism in Language and Discourse. An abstract notion at first, but one which turned out to be a thrilling subject. I chose to write this document from my personal perspective, as what I will remember of what was said during the talks, hoping that it will arouse the same interest as it did for me among those who will read it, and introduce them to this phenomenon.

 

There are around 8 million living species on earth; among them, mammals only represent 0.35% of terrestrial species. Humans are one family amidst 140 of terrestrial mammals, yet it seems that their cognitive abilities have put them at the top of a hierarchy above any other entities. Humans gave themselves the scientific name of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, in other words, the man who knows he knows. That designation is based on a relative awareness of knowledge related to a human perspective. From that perspective, humans seem to be at the top of a hierarchical chain, or at the center of a universe in which everything is classified in terms of how it can be used by man. This way of thinking is reflected in our everyday use of language and discourse. The linguistics conference which took place on March 30th and 31st 2017 at the ENS de Lyon (IFE) explored different domains in order to shed light on the notion that humans outrank any other entity. Indeed, the conference’s title was “Egocentrism and Anthropocentrism in Language and Discourse”, that is to say, how this hierarchy system structures our language and discourse.

 

We cannot help but notice that everything around us is referred to from a human perspective, and you might think, “what could be more normal”? We could try to imagine the world from a bird’s perspective but not without attributing it human terms. Indeed, we have the mental capacity to imagine ourselves in another being’s place, but not without leaving our human knowledge behind, and one element of this knowledge is language. Language is an ability that only mankind possesses; this cognitive feature separates us from the rest of the mammals. As a matter of fact, we are the only species able to describe the world around us in words. This capacity has enabled us to communicate through generations and is now part of our culture: the media, literature, any form of oral speech, etc. However, one could wonder why this special capacity has allowed humanity to put itself above any other species.

 

Human beings tend to be construed as agents.[1] In linguistics, the agent is a semantic role determined through its relationship to the action expressed by the verb. An agent is conscious, acts on purpose, and performs an action that has a physical, visible effect. From there, humans consider themselves as central, they are the first element carrying out any action, and therefore consider it normal to think of themselves first. Of course, animals can carry out actions as well, but their actions are often described through human sensing; they are often personified. Personifying an animal consists in assigning it the qualities of a person in order to make its behavior comprehensible to other humans. We can take the example of animals in science or journal articles: they often convey the idea that animals are subjects, yet if we consider a corpus of animal naming terms as subjects in a journal, we find out that the most frequent construction that is used is the passive. We can find sentences in which the subject was sustained, situated, surveyed or killed; in which animals were given or were allowed entities and experiences. In the case of laboratory animals, they have moved from being biological creatures to objects for human use. Evolution enabled mankind to remove any creature from the top of the hierarchical system; by developing our mental faculties we freed ourselves from all natural elements and creatures and took control over them. Humans have learned to manipulate their environment to their benefit, considering themselves as the most important creatures living. The term used to describe this construal is anthropocentrism, and we can notice that nowadays, it is profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures. This anthropocentrism can be found in linguistics, in the way we classify these animals: edible/inedible, wild/tame, useful/useless, and so on.

Anthropocentrism can be considered as a normal way of perceiving our world as it consists in interpreting or observing the world in terms of human values and experiences. Though science has made huge progress in the last centuries, we are still not able to fully experience another perspective. That phenomenon is significantly applied in our use of absolute adjectives. Absolute adjectives are not just comparatives, but express an absolute degree, e.g. an older man (who is not older than anyone specific, but older in terms of cultural, internal standard), the better hotels (again, better in light of a cultural standard, rather than better than specific hotels). What is interesting about absolute uses and internal standards is the human perspective for setting the standard. For instance, in She has a big dog or it is a big grain, the dog, or the grain, has to be big in human terms. When we talk about absolute value, we again have an instance of the anthropocentric nature of verbal communication, because it depicts the world from a human point of view.[2]

I will now present another form of anthropocentrism expressed in linguistics through the use of compounds in English. Here we will consider compounds denoting humans: fireman, milkman, hairdresser, etc. Compounds denoting human are comparatively not numerous: humans are less likely to be denoted by compounds than other entities. When they are, there is a manifestation of the human vs. non-human asymmetry: they are more often derogatory (e.g. valley girl in California, bird brain) than for non-humans.[3] In other words, humans have a special status. Once again, we find that notion of “special status” that we confer to ourselves because we think that in hierarchical terms humans are superior to animate/animals and inanimate. When we say of a homeless woman that she is a “plastic-lady”, it is derogatory because it reduces her to only two characteristics: lady and plastic (bags). The standard construal of humans is that they cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts; they tend to be less transparent and analyzable. Because all the faculties we have developed through our evolution have made us complex beings, we tend to think that it is harder to fully analyze ourselves than to analyze a simple animal or an object. However, we may consider this very narrow-minded as we do not know everything about the complexity of animals’ communication systems. Studies have been carried out, but we will never know for sure that there is not more to what we discovered. Coming back to compounds that denote humans, the compound may also involve a reference to a negatively-valued process (conman), or be negatively oriented because the head noun in its literal sense denotes an animal (dead duck) or an inanimate (sad sack). It seems therefore that compounding lends itself to derogatory denotation for humans. Compounds using animal nouns to denote humans are seen as particularly negative, mostly because humans outrank animals on the hierarchy scale.

The notion of human status is also crucial in other areas of language; it is also visible for instance in personal pronouns (he/she vs. it). We can see a combination between anthropocentrism and egocentrism in the fact that 1st-person pronouns are at the top of the scale, and we can then draw a circle with “I” at the center, instead of a hierarchy scale.

To summarize these ideas, one can say that from a biological point of view, animals are not inferior to humans – in many respects, they are even superior. However, humans’ intelligence has enabled them to create tools that favored them and gave them this “superiority” status. The main idea to retain here would then be that there is a hierarchical system human>animal/animate>inanimate that is reflected in our everyday use of language. Analyzing English Grammar allows us to see that for humans, there is a distinction when it comes to marking some categories of words.

Greville Corbett demonstrated that there is a distinction in singular and plural forms.[4] There is a higher degree of individuation for humans, so that in some languages such as Miya, the plural form is obligatory to talk about several humans, but optional for several inanimates. We can say that the Animacy Hierarchy splits the grammar of plurality in the language. The hierarchy is also visible in the different sources of plural. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more likely you are to have an associative reading; for instance Japanese Tanaka-tachi (‘Tanaka’ + associative plural)translates loosely as ‘Tanaka and associates’.  Greville Corbett, who studied no less than 290 languages, concludes that this notion of hierarchy is not specific to English. We can totally qualify this linguistic phenomenon as “human” because it appears in many languages all over the globe.

 



[1] Sealey Alison, Animals, Animacy, and Anthropocentrism. Egocentrism and anthropocentrism in language and discourse, March 31st.

[2] Kavalir, Monika. The anthropocentrism of absolute adjectival uses. Egocentrism and anthropocentrism in language and discourse.

[3] Mignot, Elise & Marty, Caroline. Human animate nouns and opacity: the case of compounds in English.

[4] Corbett, Greville. The Animacy Hierarchy: challenges progress and challenges. Egocentrism and anthropocentrism in language and discourse.

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