Kin terminology, as an aspect of language, was thought to demonstrate how language shaped social categories and hence actual practices.
If language shapes consciousness and consciousness determines what we experience as reality, then to toy with words in nonstandard ways might open heretofore closed doors of perception.
But the serious meaning of rhetoric is language shaped to persuade, and the quoted passage with short declarative sentences certainly means to persuade.
Almost 70 years ago, Dr. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that how we saw the world was determined by the way our native language shaped our minds.
The cocoon of their wealth and privilege, the intimacies and rivalries of childhood, the nicknames and nursery language shaped their adult lives.
Language is the principal theme of "Embassytown," a particularly deep-thinking entry in a tradition of using the speculative resources of science fiction to address how language shapes culture and society.
Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students explore how language shapes debate by researching the names and tags both advocates and opponents use when discussing a topical issue.
In the narrowest sense, flattery is a certain use of articulated language shaped by rhetorical figures and conceits -- by the use, say, of hyperbole: extravagantly exaggerating the value of something in order to persuade.
This may seem like a minor lexical adjustment, and yet, given a context in which the U.S. President wields a profoundly limited vocabulary, a more subtle understanding of the ways in which language shapes understanding offers welcome insight.
But, as Kierkegaard pointed out in his re-reading of the Genesis narrative, it tells us something about how the capacity to use language shapes the moral destiny of human beings.
