Language& Power

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Language and Power

A language is not only the means of conveying the message, rather it is the means of projecting the power over others by communication and speech. Many factors are involved in the process, such as the use of high or low pitch, pauses, repetition of words or phrases etc. The use of these features blurs the line between language and music, as these features give a language musical quality. The relationship between language and music is the most talked about topic by researchers who are on the surge of finding a relationship between these two most influencing features of a language. There is mounting curiosity in whether the brain networks receptive to music and language are distinct after rudimentary sensual processing or whether they have the same neural means. . A theory exists that music is just for the sake of entertainment. Some evolutionary biologists are discarding the opinion that music is merely a derivative of language progression. In its place it is supposed to be a serious share of the essential working of our brains and also pre-dates our language aptitude. The language manifests itself in two forms which are writing and speech. Both of these forms represent melodies of music as per the articles of Deutsch, and Nevins. One other author Isabelle Peretz has represented her ideas in her article, regarding the overlap of neural processes during the presence of the music and the language.

Deutsch and Nevins both have worked in the field and have researched on the topic of overlapping of music and language in brain while processing. Deutsch in her article; Speaking in Tone, writes about her experience that led her to think that the language and music are quite interrelated. She states that while looking for a glitch in her recording she put sentence from the recording on loop. After listening for some time that phrase again and again, and indulged herself in other things. After some time she states that she heard the song of a woman, and that she realized was the phrase uttered by her being played on loop. From this she inferred that there is a very fragile boundary between music and speech. Simply by the process of repetition she was able to convert the speech into a song. She further states that melodies of the sound are also found in the words. The speech is made up of the words or morphological units, and these units possess a melody. This stance is put by the musicians and many philosophers. Deutsch is of the view that the melodies of the sound that we hear in music are quite related to the voice of the intonation and the pitch of the speech that we use in our daily life. Nevins on the other hand states in her article that the written language also possess music and melody. He says that the written language also possesses a melody and we could clearly hear that melody at the time when typewriters were used and one could clearly hear the sound of typing and it would create a symphony and the melody. The proof is that many of the composers based their melodies on the sound of the typewriter. Now we cannot hear the voice of a pen while writing but he is of the view that the writer has melodies in his own brain while he writes. The stance of both the authors is inter-related, as they both think that the brain of humans processes in an overlapping manner, while the music and language are being processed. Though both the authors are taking the two different modes of language/communication i.e writing and speaking, still these come under the primary heading of language. They both proposed that language and music are interconnected in the brain of humans while it is processing.

That musicality affects the use of the language. Musicality includes the elements such as stress, intonation, pitch, rhythm etc. Every language has its own musicality and same is true for the English language. The language under discussion which is English is not a phonetic language. That means that the pronunciation of words cannot be told by seeing its written form. English however has all the musicality that any language can possess. It must be kept in mind that in the process of writing, meter is a main feature, particularly in verse, and punctuation, utterances, and grammar are, in operation, the corresponding of the assemblages of notes, pauses, and expressions in melodic representation. The significance of meter comes in determining our opinions of what we are listening and our succeeding responses to it, and, in effect, music and language are comparable, not just in representation, but in the significance of meter to construction and phraseology, in addition to defining our perception of what we listen to. In English the melodies of the poetry and the phrases in some of the novels are the typical examples of the presence of musicality in the language. The speaking is the process that overtly represents the music when we use intonation, and raise or lower our pitch etc.

The language plays an important role in developing an idea of how to treat others. The way someone speaks represents his personality. That’s why it is said that speech plays a vital role in developing the impression of the person. CDA is the branch of linguistics that deals with the concept of the use of power and the dominance in the language. How politicians and the influential people let their view to the public and manipulate others is all through the language. The word play, pauses, use of high and low pitch shapes the speech of the speaker that provides others a chance to think about how to deal with the others. Some people are so eloquent that others cannot help but to lose an argument to them. They gradually develop a social image of them among the peers and that image of them forces others to treat them in a certain way.

The article The Relationship between Music and Language focusses on different new researches done by the researchers. The researches were focusing on the topics related to the language and the music in human brain. Some of them focused on the psychological impacts, while some focused on the specific relationship between language and music. Patel the author of the article proposed the idea of OPERA, which is the acronym of overlap, precision, emotion, repetition, and attention. Rendering to the OPERA theory, when these circumstances come across, neural flexibility pushes the linkages in question to work with greater accuracy than desired for regular language communication.

Conventionally, music and language have been taken as diverse psychosomatic facilities. This contrast is revealed in previous concepts about the lateralization of discourse and melody in that communication roles were supposed to be contained in the left and music roles in the right-hemisphere of the brain. Though Patel's article is more an opinion paper that puts melodious proficiency into a wider setting, the 7 other criticisms essentially highlight particular features of the existing works on music and language. Looked together, this particular issue gives a brief summary of the contemporary knowledge on the linkage between music and language operations. So, musical training might help in the hinderance, reliving, and remediation of a huge variety of language, hearing, and learning impairment. While, this proof may throw novel light on how the individual’s brain uses joined network capabilities to create and control diverse operations ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"XE0duFPJ","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(J\\uc0\\u228{}ncke)","plainCitation":"(Jäncke)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":426,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/Tqq4tlqy/items/3UW9GWMA"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/Tqq4tlqy/items/3UW9GWMA"],"itemData":{"id":426,"type":"article-journal","title":"The Relationship between Music and Language","container-title":"Frontiers in Psychology","volume":"3","source":"PubMed Central","URL":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338120/","DOI":"10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00123","ISSN":"1664-1078","note":"PMID: 22557987\nPMCID: PMC3338120","journalAbbreviation":"Front Psychol","author":[{"family":"Jäncke","given":"Lutz"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2012",4,27]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",5,10]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Jäncke).

The language is one of the fundamental things that humans learn, as it is necessary to communicate with others. That’s the reason that language plays a vital role in human life. Music on the other hand is not a thing that we cannot live without or is the fundamental thing of human survival, however its importance cannot be denied. Because it complements the language. It also expresses the emotion, feelings, and that is the reason it is also taken as the means of communication. People enjoy the melodies and that is the reason the poetry has its unique impact on humans which is not the same as that of prose. It is also called the universal language as everyone can understand the feelings and the emotion portrayed through it.

Work Cited

ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Jäncke, Lutz. “The Relationship between Music and Language.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, Apr. 2012. PubMed Central, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00123.