An Exercise in Attention
On average, museum visitors spend just thirty seconds—or less—looking at each work of art. Last semester, however, linguist Maria Piñango and ten “very committed” undergraduates and graduate students spent seventy-five minutes looking at just a handful of sea-themed artworks at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG).
These students participated in Professor Piñango’s “Linguistic Meaning and Conceptual Structure” course, affectionately nicknamed “meaning class.” Drawing on both linguistics and cognitive science, the course analyzes how we experience meaning through language. Take the English word “sea,” for example, which appears in sea creature, sea legs, seasick, sea of sorrows, and seas of change. Each of these usages is called a “reading,” and the meaning of “sea” is the underlying structure from which these various readings can emerge.
The course equips students with the background and research skills to ask: How are such meaning structures formed and acquired? What is going on in the brain, psychologically and structurally? How does language enable us to induce, create, and recreate meaning?
Piñango has taught various iterations of this course before, but the art gallery component is new. It emerged after she attended a course redesign workshop at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning in spring 2024. Piñango worked with Sydney Simon, Bradley Associate Curator of Academic Affairs at YUAG, to design two class sessions using the gallery’s collections to explore linguistic meaning through visual art.
Although the link between visual and linguistic meaning may not seem obvious, one of the course’s goals is to practice translating between different kinds of meaning. As Piñango explained, “If meaning is a product of the mind, language is one window into that. But it’s not the only one. How can we talk about meaning when we look at it through the window of vision? That’s where the gallery experience comes in.”
This experience, which she approached as an experiment, took place halfway through the semester. An initial visit, focused on trompe l’oeil pieces that trick the eye, acquainted students with observation as a way of exploring meaning. Students prepared for their second visit by provisionally mapping out the “meaning space” of “sea.” Then it was time to test that map by engaging with a series of artworks that feature the sea in one way or another, such as Sakiyama Takayuki’s elegant stoneware sculpture, Listening to the Waves (Chōtō). During these visits, students benefitted from the way the gallery space encourages a different, slower form of attention than that necessitated by the rush of academic life. “We were, no pun intended, immersed in this work for two and a half weeks,” Piñango recounted, noting that she even asked students to listen to Claude Debussy’s La mer on repeat outside of class. “And that’s such a luxury. It was all made possible by going to the gallery, having a change of space, and having Sydney as a new interlocutor at the midpoint of the semester.”
Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, a second-year graduate student in the linguistics department, found that this exercise in attention enhanced the central focus of “meaning class”: “It made us think about how we process meaning outside of language, and how we use language to convey that.” As Piñango had hoped, students interpreted information from the artworks—e.g., the artist’s use of color or the piece’s movement—differently based on their backgrounds and interests. Despite these variations in perception, “ultimately we’re also able to communicate and find similar frameworks,” Alessandra explained, since the underlying structure of meaning allows us to move between different, and even unexpected, readings of “sea.”
The gallery experiment exemplifies how Piñango designed “meaning class” as a bridge for students coming to linguistics from various disciplines—the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. She credits the success of this experiment to three things: Sydney’s expert curation and facilitation during the visits; student enthusiasm; and just a touch of serendipity. While at first Piñango was not certain whether a topic as straightforward as “the sea” would be enough to sustain extended engagement, by the end of those two and a half weeks, it seems they had barely skimmed the surface.
For more information about university course visits or to register a class, please visit the Yale University Art Gallery website.
Photo: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery
