This session explores the circular rhetoric of language and the role it plays in shaping reality. The purpose of the talk is to equip you with tools to become a great storyteller in any context – meetings, discussions, pitches, presentations and interviews.

If you are looking for an in-depth understanding of narratives, how to tell yours and how to use stories for deeper human connection, this session is for you. Where sociolinguistics refers to “the study of language in relation to society” or the “ethnography of speaking”, a circular relationship exists between social context, meaning and language. Social context informs the meaning of an activity which language seeks to express. Language then feeds back into social contexts to form new meanings.

The sociosemiotic theory of language explains the connection between text (language), a situation (linguistic or non-linguistic), a text variety or register, a code, a linguistic system, and a social structure. Human meaning-making is a social practice where linguistic systems and social structures are closely related. Aside from external social contexts, meaning can also be derived from personal narratives and combined to form collective narratives. Narratives act as a linguistic source which plays an important role in deducing meaning and feeding that meaning back into the greater social domain to depict social context. In this way, cultures and societal history are shaped by narratives to form individual and collective senses of meaning.

Events and series of events are accounted for through the testimonies of lived experiences. Imperative problems are solved and questions are answered through stories which are the “tools with which people build a sense of their experience of the world and the vehicle by which they share that sense with others” (Lois Berry).

Join to take a deep dive into language, meaning and most importantly, telling great stories!