Mini overview on Linguistic Anthropology (Part 1)
Readings from Alesandro Duranti
We humans have the innate ability to learn language. Language plays a role in people lives. Studying language goes beyond grammar as we use it to yield social action.
Context, manner of using language is culturally mediated.
Linguistic anthropology - is one of anthropology’s subfields that primarily focused on the theory and practice of language.
Means to study language -> utterances -> shape meanings -> language produced
key people: Dell Hymes; Marcel Mauss; Antoine Meillet; Claude Levi-Strauss; Roger Brown; Leonard Bloomfield;
Goals of Linguistic Anthropology:
1. Importance of Language through the understanding of culture and society
2. Relevance of cultural and social phenomena of understanding of languages
Synonyms: Anthropological linguistics; Sociolinguistics; diverged meanings, different roots/history related but separate research enterprises.
Anthropological Linguistics v. Linguistic anthropology
William Foley - subfield of linguistics; concerned with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context; role in forging and sustaining cultural practices and social structures.
Chomskian Revolution: encouraged “autonomous” models of grammar and discourage the study of cultural or sociological dimensions of language.
Main Concerns of Anthropological Linguistics
(1) documentation of grammatical structures of indigenous languages without writing.
(2) language as the medium (myths, historical narratives could take form)
(3) use of language as a window on culture (worldview or weltanschauung)
!!! - many anthropologist still take language for granted, they define language as a mere transparent medium for culture.
Mainstream Linguistics - fundamentally concerned with structures of languages or grammar rather that who those who use it [speakers]
Ethnoscience - studying nomenclatures and taxonomies (animals, plants, types, of disease, etc.); genetic relations among languages (comparative method); impact of culture on language (euphemism, taboos, sacred or respectful terms)
Technical Linguistics - use of linguistic data for research; “cultural studies without linguistic consideration tend to be narrowly sociological rather than broadly anthropological”
Linguistic Anthropology - 1870s, designate a distinctly anthropological approach to the study of language. [Hymes]; study of language within the context of anthropology.
concerns: (1) study of language - central part of anthropology; (2) broaded study of language beyond grammatical structures - forms in relation to the context of their use.
Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowki: it is impossible to understand a community without understanding the language(s) used by its members. It is more than grammatical description and historical reconstruction but the interest in speakers as more than producers of linguistic forms.