Another term for this class (my, your, her...) is "genitive," but even that is not the point. The point is, a term used as a shorthand for referring to something does not necessarily imply anything about the thing itself. We could have called this word class "splorks" and
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that would not change the fact that this word class (splorks such as "my" and "your") has many uses, which varies from language to language, but generally speaking these splorks are used for a relationship *of some kind*. Possession is NOT the only kind of relationship!
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Basically: do not look for answers about what the thing is in the technical term we use for the thing. Ideally, the technical term will be descriptive, to help people remember what the thing is (splork is bad because in like 5 tweets from now you'll be like "what is splork??")
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Terminology is a shorthand, not proof of anything. Don't try to prove that "my student" = "student possessed by me" just because you have heard that category referred to as "possessive." Listen to linguists when we tell you how such words are actually used!
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Point 2) The class of "possessives" (splorks) is not the only linguistic tool used to signal possession. Another tool is "I have." Would OP propose we ban all uses of "I have [human]"? "I have a daughter." YOU MONSTER. She is "a" daughter among a child group you parent (sarcasm)
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Some languages lack possessive verbs and signal this relationship with prepositions or simply case marking on the possessor: "By me is a car" = roughly how Russians say "I have a car." In Finnish the car would be "on me." In Tsova-Tush the car would be "to+at me."
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Georgian has a distinction in the "have" verb between animate and inanimate possession. You animate-have (mq'avs) a daughter, but inanimate-have (makvs) a house. And because language is extremely weird, in Georgian you mq'avs a car because cars get classed as animates. Cool!
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Random linguistic facts aside, the point I'm trying to make is that, when (attempted) "woke" people identify a word or expression as potentially hurtful, they usually attempt to ban *only that word.* But languages have TONS of ways to accomplish any given communicative task.
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Before I go further, I am 100% on board with banning slurs such as the N-word that have no usage other than dehumanizing someone based on minority group membership (caveat: Black people using the N-word among themselves is obviously fine). Conscious, careful use of language...
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that recognizes differences in power dynamics is absolutely a step in the right direction. (The real, better step is getting rid of those power differences, or limiting the harm that can be done by the privileged class to minorities, but "not using slurs" is better than nothing)
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But what OP is doing by trying to ban "my" student (and what other "woke" people sometimes try to do) amounts to: searching the language for an instance of something that *might possibly* be hurtful, and then refusing to accept nuance in the discussion of that thing.
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But if someone possesses the harmful attitude "I own my PhD students," they can easily express that without saying "my PhD student." And because of the multifaceted use of "my" to signal numerous kinds of relationships, encouraging advisers to say "a PhD student"...
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could have the opposite effect! It sounds like the adviser is disowning them (ouch!): "A PhD student in my group" ≈ "I don't want to take responsibility for them nor acknowledge a relationship with them." Responsible advising should involve a closer relationship than that
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It does not do justice to the importance of a good adviser-advisee relationship, which is built over many years. By the end of a dissertation, an adviser *should* think of their student as "my student"—to think otherwise, you'd have to be a pretty negligent adviser, no?
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3) In the original thread, where commenters point out that "my" has many uses that do not imply possession ("my" neighbor), the OP responded by saying that there is a power differential between advisers and PhD students (true) that makes this "my" different (dubious).
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I think it's really important that linguists be publicly critical of logical leaps like this. OP is using important, good, useful progressive ideas (like acknowledging power differentials) irresponsibly. They're using the same argumentation used against actually hurtful language
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We cannot permit this formula to be the go-to for socially conscious language use: [potentially hurtful language thing] + [power difference] = [ban the language thing] Language is so much more nuanced than that!
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For instance, it is so much easier to train yourself to stop using a hurtful noun (g**** to refer to Roma) or adjective ("shrill" about women's voices), than it is to stop using an *entire word class* (possessives/genitives/splorks) in an extremely common grammatical construction
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Cases like this of misguided political correctness make it easier to criticize good, necessary political correctness. A contribution linguistics as a field ought to make is to identify a quick-and-dirty way to distinguish between good attempts at careful language use vs. bad
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I don't have a quick-and-dirty way (hence the long thread). And quick-and-dirty contradicts what I said before about the nuance of language! But in reality we can only hold people's attention for a few seconds, and people need a heuristic to spot why cancelling possessives is bad
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but cancelling slurs is good. "Never police language" is not good, but "always police language" is also not good. "Sometimes police language" is too vague. Ideas, linguists? What's the heuristic for spotting the bad vs. good kind of political correctness? (end of thread)
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I'm getting notifications for this thread again, so I just want to acknowledge this piece by the author of the original thread: https://twitter.com/BMatB/status/1209388953939431426 …. He & I had a productive convo. The point is not to dismiss ideas, but to evolve those ideas toward something better.
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