Linguistic Anthropology (3)

1. Chapter 14 Language and Ideology

1.1. Linguists have studied whay key factors can contribute to how someone will be speaking. This includes social network, restrict code, and elaborate code. Through social network the persons speaking is impacted by who they spend their time with on a daily basis. Restrict code relies on an informal way of speaking and have a small range of grammatical structure. Lastly, elaborated code is a formal language that is mostly used within educated people.

1.2. Speech and language can be persuaded by our gender, ethnicity, and class. Our ethnicity includes our national, religious and cultural affiliation. The class of individuals is dictated by their educational, familial, and economic affiliations. Lastly, our gender is the gender we choose to identify with.

1.3. William Labov held a study where he assessed the way individuals spoke in settings that had different social classes. Specifically in stores in New York. He found that the sales person in the department stores would change the way the spoke to depending on the class they were targetting.

2. Chapter 13 Language and Gender

2.1. The study between language and culture was inspired by an article written by Robin Lakoff. The article was "Language and Woman's Place"

2.2. Women are more commonly seen using tag questions and hedge words in their communication. Tag questios are a form a questions where an individual makes an assertoin while still looking for confirmation. One example is "The car is parked by the tree, isn't it?". Hedge words are used to avoid sounding assertive. An example of these includes "perhaps" or "I guess".

2.3. Some common patterns seen in a mans communication is that they speak in a way that will establish dominance for them. As opposed to women who prefer to establish intimacy. One common thing we see in men is that they tend to raise their voice.

2.4. Fun Fact: Gossiping is most typically associated with women however it is found males also gossip on a regular basis.

3. Chapter 12 Language and Culture

3.1. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis theorizes that language is an important factor on how individuals see the world. Each individuals lives in their own lingusitic world.

3.2. In Whorfs hypothesis he points out two key concepts. One being linguistic determinism. This is the belief that the way one thinks is determined the by the language the person speaks. Next we have linguistic relativity that implies the differences in languages goes hand in hand with the differences in the persons world views.

3.3. One example of how a person speech can affect how they view the world is found when observing Navajo and English speakers. English speakers associate an object primarily by using their color and size instead of their shape. While Navajo speakers associate an object primarily by the shape and material instead of their color and size.

4. Chapter 11 Culture as Cognition

4.1. "But when does language cease to be self contained? At some point language must make contact with the outside world. As the noted twentieth century linguist Dwight Bolinger said, this point of contact is what we call meaning, and the study of meaning is generally referred to as semantics." (Stanlaw, eta. 213)

4.2. Words can have a connotation and denotation. The connotation of a word focuses on the emotions it provokes. They can have a postive connotation and a negative connotation. For example, the word dumb has a negative connotation. The denotation of a word is its literal meaning.

4.3. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqyS7AiHqLY

4.4. Binary oppositions help us structure out thoughts and we stick to these boundaries. Binary oppositions in our language are synonyms and antonyms. Some examples being male and female, poor and rich, and good and evil.

4.5. Folk Taxonomy: Name and classification of items through their own cultures perspective Example: The language used to describe car parts in the United States

5. Chapter 10 Ethnography Linguistics

5.1. There are social rules that help navigate language. There is linguistic competence where an individual has the knowledge of the grammatical rules from the mother tongue. Secondly, there is communicative competence. This is seen when an individual has the knowledge and experience to communicate appropiately in any social context. Communicative competence is very action oriented.

5.2. The participants in communication include the sender of the message and the receiver. The receiver can be the direct person/s the message is meant for, however anyone who is the same area and hears can also be the receiver indirectly.

5.3. Components of speech behavior include speech situation, speech act, and speech event. Speech situation is the setting the communication is taking place for. It centers around the purpose of the communication. A speech act can vary in magnitude it can be a contribution to saying Amen at a church or an introduction at a social setting. A speech event is the combination of multiple speech acts. An example of a speech event is an interview.

6. Chapter 9 Language Variation

6.1. "The recognition of individuals by voice alone is possible because of their idiosynatric combination of voice quality, pronunciation, grammatical usage, and choice of words." (Stanlaw, eta. 179)

6.2. A persons dialect can influenced by the area they live in, their occupation, their level of education, and their economic status. In many instances, individuals in a lower economic class would mimic the way of speaking of those in the higher class to try and seem more superior and elite.

6.3. A persons idiolect is used to describe the range their speech can vary. In my personal experience the way I speak can change when I am with my family, at work, friends, social gathering, and at school. When I am at school and work I tend to speak in a formal way. With my friends and family I do not speak formally and it is more casual. However, even if it is more casual when I am speaking with my family I do try to be more respectful and less vulgar.

6.4. Pidgins are a form of cross cultural communication that allows individuals speak to different languages to communicate. This form of communication has restricted vocabulary and has no structure. It is typically practice on a level of necessity.

7. Chapter 1 Language and Culture

7.1. "By World War II, anthropology was well established as an academic field and was taught at major US universities. The four main subfield then recognized-in large part a legacy of Boas- were biological (or physical) anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology." (Stanlaw, Adachi, Salzmann, 9)

7.2. Linguistic anthropology is the study of humans and society from a language perspective. It focuses on the structure of language and how it is used.Those who take part in this study are known as linguistics.

7.3. Franz Boas is known as the father of modern anthropology. He was born in Germany on July 9, 1858. One of his first accomplishments was his theory of cultural relativism.

7.4. Culture is a system of symbols in someones head. It includes the environment that the culture derives from and its values, beliefs, and prejudices.

8. Chapter 2 Methods of Linguistic Anthropology

8.1. "Linguistic anthropologist view language in its cultural framework and are concerned with the rules for its social use; the analysis of its structure is therefore only a means to an end. By contrast, linguistics in their study of languages emphasize linguistic structure and the historical development of languages." ( Stanlaw, eta. 32)

8.2. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goJ4hC5To0c

8.3. Delly Hymes and John Gumperz had a different approach. They believed the study should beyong grammar. They believed language should be studied in a more social context. Circling in on how it is used in specific settings varying from environment and audience.

9. Chapter 3 Language is Sound: Phonology

9.1. "Even if we are not sociologists, most of us are aware that there are differences in our society based on economic class, social status, education and other variables. This is probably true for any society in the world." (Stanlaw, eta. 35)

9.2. Phonology focuses on the sound units of a language and how they are organized. It circles in on phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language.

9.3. How someone pronunciates a word can change its sound. This variation can occur when individuals are from different locations or a different class. Individuals from the middle class often try to mimic the pronunciation of those from the high class to sound more polished.

9.4. English has many sounds that are similat but have very opposite meanings. An example provided by the textbook is "The sun's rays meet." and "The sons raise meat.".

10. Chapter 4 Morphology

10.1. Morphology is the study of word structure. It also studies its classification and how they intertwine with one another. Morphology is a greek term with morph- meaning shape or form and -ology meaning the study of something.

10.2. Free morphemes are the most common kind of morphemes. These are morphemes that can stand on their own and still having meaning without being attached to other words. Some examples include "act" "grace" and "dog"

10.3. On the contrary from free mophemes we have bound morphemes. These morphemes are combined with others in order to create a word. An example would be -ing, -ly, un-, and mis-.

10.4. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu_d5W7Xde0

11. Chapter 5 Nonverbal Communication

11.1. Nonverbal communication is a form of communication that does not use spoken words. This form of communication uses touch, body gestures, facial expressions, and spacing. This form of communication can be just as powerful as spoken words sometimes even more powerful.

11.2. Kinesics is a form of non-verbal communication. This form focuses specifically on body language. For example, one may focus on someones posture. A person who is standing tall, chest up, and shoulders down, can come off as confident and gain superiority.

11.3. Another form of nonverbal communication is haptics. This form of communication is done through touch. Haptics is one form of communication that is the least displayed. Studies have shown that those who lack touch show higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. (Field, 2020)

11.4. Video: https://youtu.be/2TlZjFGriLw

12. Chapter 6 Language Development

12.1. There are different channels of communication. This includes the acoustic channel, optical channel, tactile channel, and olfactory channel. The acoustic channel is pretty straight forward this includes speech, whistling, and talking. The optical channel is based on writing, gestures and pictures. We also have the tactile channel. This channel of communication uses the sense of touch like braile. Lastly, we have the olfactory channel which focuses on smell.

12.2. Charles Hocket first established seven "design features" of language. With time this eventually developed into a total of sixteen. This included vocal auditory, broadcast transmission and directional reception, rapid fading, interchangeability, complete feedback, specialization, semanticity, arbitariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity/openess, duality of patterning, cultural transmission, prevarication, reflexiveness, and lastly learnability.

12.3. Language death is a significant contributor to language development. When the last speaker of a certain language dies language death occurs. In 2009 approximately 1,400 languages were extinct.

12.4. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_zVfVbDnAU

13. Chapter 7 Acquiring Language

13.1. "Acquistion of language should not be studied without considering the social cultural context in which it takes place." (Stanlaw, eta. 156)

13.2. Noam Chomsky believed we had an internal desire to learn communication. His belief contributed to the idea of language acquisition devide (LAD). LAD is the ability for a young infant to learn their mother tongue without any formal teaching/learning process.

13.3. Sociocultural theory implies there is a correlation between language and culture. In order to become a member of a society they must acquire the societies language.

13.4. Code switching is significant in communication because it helps you captivate and reach your appropriate audience. We can see the use of code switching through presidential elections. A great example is Barack Obama we can see how he changes his way of speaking to target the right audience. One example is his well known "mic drop" moment.

14. Chapter 8 Language Through Time

14.1. Language can be examined through two different approaches. This being a synchronic approach and a diachronic approach. Both regard linguistic phenomena however the diachronic approach takes into consideration historical advancements.

14.2. We can see changes like dissimilation and metathesis. Dissimilation is the affect of one speech sound on another speech sound to avoid them sounding alike. An example being the word February, we tend to avoid pronunciating both r's. With metathesis we see a change in the order of linguistic elements. An example is dropping the e in mathematics.

14.3. "Living languages change slowly but constantly. Old English is no longer intelligible to speakers of Modern English, and even words that rhymed in Shakespeare's time do not always rhyme today." (Stanlaw, eta. 175)