Being a Foreigner in Philosophy: A Taxonomy

Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena Erlenbusch

The question of diversity, both with regard to the demographic profile of philosophers as well as the content of philosophical inquiry, has received much attention in recent years. One figure that has gone relatively unnoticed is that of the foreigner. To the extent that philosophers have taken the foreigner as their object of inquiry, they have focused largely on challenges nonnative speakers of English face in a profession conducted predominantly in English. Yet an understanding of the foreigner in terms of the nonnative speaker does not exhaust the conceptual space of the foreigner. This article provides a more nuanced conceptual apparatus that allows for a more precise identification and discussion of other ways in which one can be a foreigner in philosophy. I develop a taxonomy of different conceptions of the foreigner, namely the linguistic, material, cultural, and epistemic foreigner; I discuss the different and specific challenges they face; and I show how foreigners enrich philosophical practice.

1984 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Gass

ABSTRACTThis study examines the acquisition of production and perception by adult learners of English. The particular focus is voice onset time of initial /b/'s and /p/'s. The subjects are 10 nonnative speakers of English and six native speakers who provided identification responses to synthesized stimuli varying along a voice onset time continuum. Additionally, they each produced words with initial /b/'s and /p/'s. These measures were repeated at three 1-month intervals for the nonnative speakers. The results show that nonnative speaker perception differs from native speaker perception in two important ways: (1) stop consonants are perceived continuously rather than categorically and (2) nonnative speaker perception is influenced by the location of phoneme boundaries in both the native and target languages. Nonnative speaker production shows a greater amount of similarity to native speaker production, although, where deviations occur, nonnative speakers tend to overcompensate for differences between the native and target languages. Finally, methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of perception and production.


Semiotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (222) ◽  
pp. 87-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia David

AbstractThis study investigates repair sequences between two nonnative speakers of English while they engaged in naturally occurring talk outside of the second language classroom. Eight hours of naturally occurring talk between native and nonnative speakers were collected and analyzed. The present study reports on one hour of the data which shows two types of repair: Self-initiated and other-corrected and other-initiated. The analysis of the repair sequences shows that the self-initiated and other-corrected repair sequences follow a distinct pattern of asking for confirmation on the production of a language item and receiving a correction, while the other-initiated repair is done differently from the ones found in the literature on repair and do not follow the rules of preference for self-correction described by some researchers in the Conversation Analysis literature. In addition, the other-initiated repair analyzed in this study does not appear to be modulated, that is, the person initiating the correction does not offer a candidate solution by asking a question and displaying uncertainty, as researchers found. The repair sequences show a particularly interesting expert-novice relationship in which one nonnative speaker relies on a more expert nonnative speaker to communicate with a native English speaker.


2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50
Author(s):  
Jesse Wall

This article is a cry for help. It is a search for some possible view of legal philosophy that does not render it either intrinsically useless or useless in its current form. In this article I focus on two methodological hallmarks of contemporary anglophone legal philosophy. The first is the Archimedean way in which the legal theorist places a critical distance between him- or herself and the subject matter of the philosophical inquiry. The second is the introverted way in which the accuracy of any given legal theory is confined to the theorist’s own puzzles, concerns, controversies, and preoccupations. Whilst I consider those who have turned against these methodological commitments and called for an anti-Archimedean or extroverted approach to legal theory, I explain how those who accept both commitments adopt a very modest view of the helpfulness of legal philosophy. I then consider whether, contrary to the modest view, if we accept both commitments, then whatever is true in legal philosophy will always be trivially true, irrelevant, or inconsequential, for any non-philosophical practice or non-philosophical inquiry about the law. The value of this article, I hope, lies in its refutation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Davood Souri ◽  
Ali Merç

Twitter plays an important role in today’s world. Its role among politicians and those who are interested in politics is more obvious. Due to its importance and special characteristics such as character limits, it has drawn the attention of many researchers including linguists and ELT researchers. This study aimed to compare the perceptions of native and nonnative speakers in identifying speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets. The subjects of this study were nine English native speakers and twenty nonnative English teachers who were Turkish citizens. Thirty- seven tweets of Donald Trump over the course of a week were selected and the participants were asked to identify the speech acts of the tweets based on the speech acts taxonomy by Searle (1976). The analysis of the data revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English identified the speech acts of the large majority of the tweets very differently. These differences were partly due to lack of enough political as well as background knowledge and partly due to lack of contextual variables.


2001 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 123-135
Author(s):  
Jeanine Deen

In conversations between native and nonnative speakers, problems in understanding may occur quite frequently. If one of the speakers tries to repair the trouble, negotiation of meaning will take place. This article describes the roles native and nonnative speakers of Dutch play in negotiating meaning in informal and institutional conversations and the influence of language proficiency and setting on the role distribution. Interaction data were used from a large longitudinal adult second language acquisition project (Perdue, 1993a/b). The relative distribution of the three main negotiation moves (trouble indicators, trouble clarifications and confirmation checks) showed that asymmetry occurs in both types of conversation at all three moments of measurement indicating that language proficiency is indeed a factor causing asymmetry (c.f. Deen, 1997). The nonnative speaker and the native speaker held complementary roles, the former mainly indicating trouble and the latter clarifying and checking. The influence of setting on the asymmetry was less clear because there was little difference between the two settings. The semi-authenticity of the data may partly explain this outcome. Furthermore, it could be shown that the use of confirmation checks by the native speaker could be an indicator of dominance but only when there is competition between the two speakers.


1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 695-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Reynolds ◽  
Donald Fucci ◽  
Z. S. Bond

This study compared the effect of visual cuing on the intelligibility of DECtalk for native and nonnative speakers of English in both ideal listening conditions and in the presence of background noise at a signal to noise (S/N) ratio of + 10dB. Visual cuing improved DECtalk's intelligibility for normative speakers more than for native speakers, especially in the background noise condition. Implications of these findings and the need for further research are discussed.


2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA FELSER ◽  
IAN CUNNINGS

ABSTRACTWe report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners’ initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding.


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