ANTROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.

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This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology.

His personal research contributions gave him an important place in the history of anthropology.  Even Boas has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.” Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

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—Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:

—Eskimo–Aleut

—Algonkin–Wakashan

—Nadene

—Penutian

—Hokan–Siouan

—and Aztec–Tanoan.

    Sapir's classification (or something derivative) is still commonly used in general languages-of-the-world type surveys.

—Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.

  For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

Activity

Ethnography of Speech

http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565071/ethnography_of_speech.htm

Activity

THE LONDON SCHOOL
http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565060/the_london_school.htm

A C T I V I T Y

So, this is and activity regarding the topic of Chomsky's context-free grammar and Formalism. It's not that hard. Good luck guys!

http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/565053/chomsky_activity.htm

Ethnography of Speech

•       The role of speech in human behavior has always been honored in anthropological principle, if sometimes slighted in practice. The importance of its study has been declaimed, surveyed with insightful detail, and accepted as a principle of field work.

•       The Ethnography was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. 

•       The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.

•       EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or, what Gerry Philipsen (1975) calls a "speech community." Speech communities create and establish their own speaking codes/norms. 

•       The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities.

•       Thus, “the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking. 

The London School

The London School

¢  Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century.

¢  Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform-.

Phonetics

Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography

¢  Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound.

¢  He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. 

Linguistics

¢  J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject.

¢  Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)

¢  It was founded in 1916.

London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.

¢  A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

¢  The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.

¢  It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.

¢  Linguistics of the London School have done much  more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.

¢  To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.

¢  Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

¢  Firth accepted Malinowski’s view of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, which occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways.

¢  Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.

¢  To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed sentences in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.

FORMALISM

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas. 


—A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting must start. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator. 


However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a "recognizer"—a function in computing that determines whether a given string belongs to the language or is grammatically incorrect. To describe such recognizers, formal language theory uses separate formalisms, known as automata theory. 


The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate
universal grammar, and a disregard for the role of stimuli. According to this position,
language use is only relevant in triggering the innate structures. 

With regard to the tradition, Chomsky’s position can be characterized as a continuation of essential principles of structuralist theory from Sauss...ure. This is particularly the case for Saussure’s principles of abstractness and arbitrariness. In Chomsky’s formalism, though, the principles of abstractness of language structure and the arbitrariness between linguistic structure and meaning are preserved – and the degree of abstractness is increased.