"slut shaming" in NSM
Friday, June 25th, 2010 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mothwingAs a hobby linguist I've been curious about Goddard's and Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage/semantic primes as an L2 teaching and learning tool for a while, and I've been trying to apply it to various concepts I've encountered so far with varying success.
The notion of cultural scripts I find particularly interesting, and I've been trying to apply those to some cultural scripts of our own.
Here's some example of cultural scripts:
Here's a table of semantic primes (Goddard, 2002):
So what does that give us for "slut shaming"?
I got something like this:
The notion of cultural scripts I find particularly interesting, and I've been trying to apply those to some cultural scripts of our own.
Here's some example of cultural scripts:
«Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for?»
"Consider the following set of three Anglo scripts (Wierzbicka in press a). They express the central Anglo value sometimes termed ‘‘personal autonomy’’ [A], the consequent cultural inadvisability of issuing overt directives [B], and the availability of a culturally approved alternative strategy, namely, presenting the addressee with a quasi-directive message in the guise of a suggestion [C]. Because they are framed exclusively in the controlled vocabulary and grammar of the natural semantic metalanguage, they can be readily transposed across languages, unlike words such as autonomy, directive, and suggestion which are the ‘‘private property’’, so to speak, of the English language.
[A] [people think like this:]
[A] [people think like this:]
when a person is doing something
it is good if this person can think about it like this:
‘I am doing this because I want to do it
not because someone else wants me to do it’
[B] [people think like this:]it is good if this person can think about it like this:
‘I am doing this because I want to do it
not because someone else wants me to do it’
when I want someone to do something
it is not good if I say something like this to this person:
‘I want you to do it
I think that you will do it because of this’
[C] [people think like this:]it is not good if I say something like this to this person:
‘I want you to do it
I think that you will do it because of this’
when I want someone to do something
it can be good if I say something like this to this person:
‘maybe you will want to think about it
maybe if you think about it you will want to do it’"
it can be good if I say something like this to this person:
‘maybe you will want to think about it
maybe if you think about it you will want to do it’"
-Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, 2004
Here's a table of semantic primes (Goddard, 2002):
So what does that give us for "slut shaming"?
I got something like this:
[people think like this:]
I want to say you are a bad person. Because of this I say you do things with your body and many other people's bodies.
It is good to do things with your and one other person's body, but not many people's - that makes you a bad person.
I want people to know that I know this is bad.
You are a person to whom I can say, "You are a bad person", and you cannot do bad things to me because of this.
People will think it is true if I say to you,
"You are a bad person, and you are doing bad things with your body"
I want you to think that you are a bad person.
It is good to do things with your and one other person's body, but not many people's - that makes you a bad person.
I want people to know that I know this is bad.
You are a person to whom I can say, "You are a bad person", and you cannot do bad things to me because of this.
People will think it is true if I say to you,
"You are a bad person, and you are doing bad things with your body"
I want you to think that you are a bad person.
...which leaves out the gendered double-standard, and its still pretty choppy. I wish we'd have had courses on this at uni, though they probably wouldn't have done me any good, given that I'm not a linguist.
Anyone have any ideas?
Anyone have any ideas?
