An Interview with Dr. Andie Tucher, Columbia Journalism School

Columbia School of Journalism professor Andie Tucher talks about her forthcoming book on the history of fake news in the United States. She explains how, despite the fact that fake news has a long history in America, earlier incarnations were far less harmful than our current “post-truth” era. She also defines and examines what she calls “fake journalism,” which uses the conventions of objective journalism but in deceptive ways to mislead people into accepting lies as truth.

Linguistic Meaning Meets Linguistic Form

This book steers a middle course between two opposing conceptions that currently dominate the field of semantics, the logical and cognitive approaches. It brings to light the inadequacies of both frameworks, and argues along with the Columbia School that linguistic semantics must be grounded on the linguistic sign itself and the meaning it conveys across the full range of its uses. The book offers 12 case studies demonstrating the explanatory power of a sign-based semantics, dealing with topics such as complementation with aspectual and causative verbs, control and raising, wh- words, full-verb inversion, and existential-there constructions. It calls for a radical revision of the semantics/pragmatics interface, proposing that the dividing-line be drawn between semiologically-signified notional content (i.e. what is linguistically encoded) and non-semiologically-signified notional content (i.e. what is not encoded but still communicated). This highlights a dimension of embodiment that concerns the basic design architecture of human language itself: the ineludable fact that the fundamental relation on which language is based is the association between a mind-engendered meaning and a bodily produced sign. It is argued that linguistic analysis often disregards this fact and treats meaning on the level of the sentence or the construction, rather than on that of the lower-level linguistic items where the linguistic sign is stored in a stable, permanent, and direct relation with its meaning outside of any particular context. Building linguistic analysis up from the ground level provides it with a more solid foundation and increases its explanatory power.

A final comparison with the Columbia School approach to meaning

This chapter marks the points of divergence between the approach taken in the book and the Columbia School, which both share the assumption that linguistic categories take the form of signal-meaning pairs and that meanings are language-specific. The Columbia School postulates that meanings are inherently relational and divide up semantic fields contrastively in an exhaustive way. Contrary to this Saussurean-style postulate, it is argued that meaning is not essentially contrastive or relational in nature and that assuming that it is leads to a significant distortion of certain meanings, especially those treated as unmarked in the binary opposition-based system.

Introductory remarks on the question of the autonomy of syntax

This chapter lays down the gauntlet to challenge the autonomy of syntax, a basic principle of linguistic analysis proposed by Chomsky in 1982 and followed by most researchers working in the generative paradigm. It announces the book’s intent to argue that semantics plays a highly significant role in syntax, and that a properly articulated linguistic semantics, together with the requisite pragmatics, goes a long way towards explaining the relational processes involved in the building of syntactic sequences in natural language. This relates the approach taken in the book to those advocated by the Columbia School and by Cognitive Grammar.

Experiences of second-generation students of Punjabi Sikh ancestry in the British Columbia school system

Punjabi Sikhs migrating to Canada form a disproportionately large population of the migrants from South Asia. There has been limited research or current literature on the schooling experiences of the second-generation children of these migrants despite the large numbers of this group migrating to Canada. The effects of minority status within the K-12 British Columbia school system regarding school experiences of second-generation students of Punjabi Sikh descent are presented throughout this research process. The investigation focused on the research participants’ perceived school experiences and whether there were differences based on the school type’s demographic composition of responders. I categorized these school types into three: small minority population, large minority population, and large majority population. I hypothesized that schools with large majority populations would have greater perceived satisfaction with school experiences. I found that I could further analyze by subscale and total scale groupings, based on my original correlational analysis. I found differences on school experiences (SE) and home experiences (HE) subscales based on school type, school type being differentiated by schools with a minority population, a large minority population, or a large majority population of the responder demographic of second-generation students of Punjabi Sikh descent. I found that responders from small minority population schools and large minority population schools showed a statistically significant difference in responses than responders from large majority population schools.