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Language, Nineteen eighty-four, and 1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2009

Michał Buchowski ,
David B. Kronenfeld ,
William Peterman  and
Lynn Thomas
Michał Buchowski
Affiliation:
Ethnology & Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. sw. Marcin 78, 61-874 poznań, Poland
David B. Kronenfeld
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0418
William Peterman
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0101
Lynn Thomas
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Pomona College, 425 N. College Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711-6361
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Abstract

The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of “doublethink”. We use the semantic theory of David Kronenfeld, along with Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and Jean Piaget's views of how children's cognitive systems develop (including natural language), to derive a theoretical explanation for the failure of the Orwellian prediction and of the Communist linguistic efforts on which it was predicated. The explanation involves Ferdinand de Saussure's central idea that language is an interlinked system which is crucially social, and points to the critical role of childre's early language learning (in mundane, everyday contexts) on the development and structuring of their adult system. (Extensionist semantics, politics and language, cognitive dissonance, Central Europe, Poland, George Orwell, propaganda, language change)

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Type
Articles
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Language in Society , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , September 1994 , pp. 555 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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