As much as possible ask 10 or so people for a short description of the same thing that they experienced (a ride on the subway, or a trip to buy groceries, or etc.) The questions to answer are:
- Do different people use different concepts to describe the same things? How much variety is there?
- Do different people use the different phrases to describe the same concepts?
- Do different people use the same phrases to describe different concepts?
We could call this a profiling of language personality. It is an intrinsically interesting topic - the empirical classification of people by their language use parameters. You could have someone with broad vocabulary saying nothing but a few routine things and someone with a limited vocabulary using a broad variety of concepts and saying a good deal. You could have bell shaped curves. The point is that these interesting things cannot be studied with S-n-G notation alone but they can be studied with that plus proto semantic notation.
Like any other form of profiling, doing it for language personality would be a basis for discrimination. Is it OK to discriminate based on language personality? Clearly not, because your references are always based on some other discrimination. But analyzing differences is not the same as basing discrimination on them.
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