Transcript Language and Communi..

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WHAT IS
LANGUAGE?
LANGUAGE, THOUGHT,
AND CULTURE
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Focal Vocabulary
NONHUMAN PRIMATE
Meaning
COMMUNICATION
Call systems
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Sign Language
Linguistic Diversity
Origin of Language
Gender Speech Contrasts
Language and Status
NONVERBAL
Position
COMMUNICATION
Stratification
Black English Vernacular
STRUCTURE OF
(BEV)
LANGUAGE
Speech Sounds
HISTORICAL
LINGUISTICS
Language Loss
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What is Language?
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Maybe spoken or written
Primary means of communication
Transmitted through learning (enculturation)
Always changing
Linguistic anthropologist explore the role of language in colonization and the
expansion of world economy
Nonhuman Primate
Communication
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Call systems - communication systems of nonhuman
primates
 Call systems are only produced by environmental stimuli
Sign Language:
 Apes have been taught to communicate with human through sign
language
 Washoe was the first chimp to learn ASL, at age two she began to
construct rudimentary sentences
Nonhuman Primate
Communication
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Cultural transmission – transmission through learning,
basic to language
 Washoe and other chimps have tried
to teach ASL to other animals including
their own offspring
 Penny Patterson began to work with
Gorillas at Stanford University. Patterson
raised and trained Koko, a female gorilla,
whom can regularly employ
400 ASL signs.
Nonhuman Primate
Communication
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The Origin of Language:
 A mutation of gene FOXP2, explains why humans can
speak and chimps do not.
 When comparing human and chimp genomes, the
mutation of FOXP2 appeared around in man around
150,000 years ago.
HUMAN LANGUAGE
PRIMATE CALL SYSTEMS
Capacity to speak of past events
Are stimuli-dependent
Can combine expressions
Calls can not be combines
Language can be culturally
transmitted
Little variation among groups
of the same species
Nonverbal
Communication
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Facial expressions, bodily stances, gestures and movements can
convey information and are an important part of human
communication
Kinesics - study of communication through body movement
and facial expressions
Linguists pay attention not only to what is said but how it is
said, and to features besides language itself that convey
meaning.
The Structure of
language
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Speech sounds
 Phoneme – smallest sound contrast that distinguishes
meaning
 Phonemes are found by comparing minimal pairs -
words that resemble each other in all but one sound. (EX:
pit/bit)
Language, Thought, &
Culture
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The Sapir-Whorft Hypothesis
 Edward Sarpir and student Benjamin Lee Whorft:
Argued that grammatical categories of different
languages lead their speakers to think about things
in particular ways
Focal Vocabulary – set words describing particular domains (foci) of
experience
Lexicon – is a language’s dictionary, its set of names for things, events,
and ideas. Lexicon influences perception.
 Language, culture and thought are interrelated. In opposition to SapirWhorft Hypothesis, it is more reasonable to say changes in culture
produce change in language and thought than the reverse.
Language, Thought, &
Culture
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Ethnosemantics – study of lexical categories and contrasts.
Semantics – a language’s meaning system.
Meaning
 Speakers of particular language use sets
of terms to organized, or categorize, their
experiences and perceptions. Linguistics
terms and contrasts encode differences
in meaning that people perceive.
Sociolinguistics
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No language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like
everyone else. The field sociolinguistics investigates relationships
between social and linguistics variation.
Linguistic Diversity
 Everyone's speech varies in different contexts
Style shifts – varying one’s speech in different social contexts
Diglossia – Language with “high” (formal) and low (informal,
familial) dialects
Sociolinguistics
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Just as social situations influence our speech, so do geographic, cultural,
and socioeconomic differences.
Our tendency to think of particular dialects as cruder or more
sophisticated than others is a social judgment.
Gender Speech Contrasts
 Comparing men and women, there are differences in
phonology, grammar, and vocabulary as well in the body stances
and movements that accompany speech
Sociolinguistics
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Multiple negation (I don’t want none) according to gender and class (in
percentages)
UMC
LMC
UWC
LWC
Male
6.3
32.4
40.0
90.1
Female
0.0
1.4
35.6
58.9
Language and Status Position
Honorifics – terms of respect; used to honor people
 Certain terms can imply a status deference between speaker and to
whom is being referred.
Sociolinguistics
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Stratification
 Speech in study in context of extralinguistic forces:
social, political, and economic.
 The speech of low status groups are view negatively not because
the speech itself is wrong but because they symbolize low status
Black English Vernacular (BEV)
 Dialect spoken by majority of black youth in most parts of US
 Phonology and syntax are similar to southern dialects
SE
SE Contraction
BEV
You are tired
You’re tired
You tired
He is tired
He’s tired
He tired
We are tired
We’re tired
We tired
They are tired
They’re tired
They tired
Historical Linguistics
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Daughter Languages – languages sharing a common parent language
Protolanguage – Language ancestral to several daughter languages
Languages evolves, varies and divides into subgroups. Dialects of
a language become distinct daughter languages. Evolving speech
within ancestral homeland should be considered a daughter
language. Close relationships between languages does not
necessarily mean that their speakers closely related biologically or
culturally.
Language Loss
One aspect of linguistic history is language loss. When languages
disappear, cultural diversity is reduced as well.