Language and Culture

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Language and Culture
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Language

• System of human communication utilizing arbitrary
  vocal (or visual) symbols for the exchange of
  information.
• Minimal linguistic event involves
• two human beings with
• healthy auditory (or visual) systems (receiver),
  
• healthy vocal (or visual) systems (transmitter),
  and
• healthy nervous systems connecting 2 and 3 to
• healthy brains
• a physical link between the two humans
• a shared grammar (encoder/decoder), located in
  the left hemispheres of their brains.

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WHY IS LANGUAGE IMPORTANT ?

• Allows the communication of complex and abstract
  concepts.
• Provides a means by which customs, norms, and
  important information can be passed between
  generations and preserved.
• The process of language acquisition forms the way
  we think
• Language is the vehicle of culture.

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Linguistic Anthropology

• Devoted to the study of human communication
• Study of non-Western languages
• Relationship between nationalism and language
• Role of language in mass media
• Applying research to improved language learning

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Origins of Language

• Many primates communicate using calls, body
  postures and gestures
• Modern verbal language developed by 50,000 years
  ago, perhaps earlier
• Emergence of writing associated with emergence of
  the state.

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SEMANTIC UNIVERSALITY

• Humans are able to convey information relevant to
  all aspects of experience and thought.
• All human languages share the same fundamental
  properties.

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Semantic Universality is achieved due to three
basic aspects of language

• PRODUCTIVITY
• The capacity to create an infinite number of new
  messages with any level of detail.
• DISPLACEMENT
• The ability to send or receive a message without
  direct sensory contact with the conditions or
  events to which the message refers. (Abstract
  concepts)
• ARBITRARINESS
• The symbols of language can be completely
  arbitrary. They do not have to resemble or mimic
  any aspect of what they are representing. This
  allows for the great diversity of languages and
  symbols.

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Linguistics The discipline which studies
language structure (grammar).

• Linguistics is descriptive, and describes the way
  people talk not the way they should talk.
• Structural linguistics breaks down language into
  hierarchical levels of structure, from broader to
  smaller categories.

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ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

• All human languages are composed of, or can be
  described in terms of, the same basic elements.

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Grammar

• The rules that govern the structure of a
  language.
• OR A system located in human brains that
  specifies the relationship between sound and
  meaning in language.

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Basic structure of grammars

• A system of elements and rules
• basic sounds
• rules for putting them together into minimal,
  basic sound-meaning pairs ("words")
• rules for putting minimal sound-meaning pairs
  into larger entities (phrases, sentences).

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Types of Grammar

• Descriptive grammar
• an objective description model of the grammar of
  a natural spoken language (the product of
  linguistic analysis) description of how people
  actually speak.
• Prescriptive grammar
• statements regarding how people should speak (or
  write) in order to be considered "correct" or
  "educated" (social prescriptions, norms).

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Phonetics

• PHONETICS The study of the phones or
  individual sounds that native speakers make.
• PHONES The basic, etic sounds that make up
  phonemes
• PHONEMES The basic sound units of the grammar,
  used to make different minimal sound-meaning
  pairs. The smallest sound contrasts that
  distinguish meaning.
• PHONEMIC SYSTEM All the phonemes in a given
  language the set of phones that are arbitrarily
  but habitually perceived by the speakers as
  contrastive.

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Phonemes

• Minimal pair
• two words (or other sound-meaning units)
  distinguished from one another by a single
  phonetic contrast.
• Free variation
• alternation of sounds with no change in meaning.

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Phonetic Alphabet

• A system for phonetic transcription (i.e., a
  written record) of sounds of spoken language.
• Sounds are classified according to the origin of
  the sound, state of the vocal chords, and the
  position of the articulators.

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Phonetic alphabet

• Vocal cord states
• maximally tense stopped glottal stop
• minimally tense voiceless voiceless glottal
  fricative
• intermediate voiced voiced glottal fricative
• Articulators movable speech organs in the oral
  cavity
• lips
• tongue
• velum (soft palate)

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Places of Articulation in the Vocal Tract
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Places of Articulation

• Labials Sounds made by changing the position of
  the lips
• Bilabial bringing two lips together b p m
• Labiodental touching one lip to the teeth f
  v in fine and vine
• Alveolars Sounds made by raising the tongue to
  the alveolar ridge
• Voiced d do z zoo
• Nasal n new
• Voiceless t two s sue
• Interdental Sounds make by placing the tip of
  the tongue between the teeth
• Voiceless t thin and ether
• Voiced t in then and either
• Velars Sounds made by placing the back of the
  tongue onto the soft palate or velum.
• The endings of the words back, bag, and band
• Palatals The front part of the tongue is raised
  to the hard palatte.
• Shoe, shut, sure, and sugar

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Manners of articulation

• Stops
• Aspirated vs. Unaspirated Sounds
• Fricatives
• Afficates
• Sibilants
• Obstruents
• Liquids
• Glides

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Morphology

• Morphology The rules for combining phonemes
  into morphemes.
• Morpheme The smallest part of an utterance that
  has a definte meaning.
• minimal sound-meaning unit.
• Morphemes come in two varieties
• Bound Morpheme a morpheme that never occurs
  alone (i.e., is not a word).
• Suffixs and prefixes ing, ed, mal, pre,
• Free Morpheme a morpheme that may occur alone
  (i.e., is a word).

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Morphology

• Word minimal free form.
• The smallest part of an utterance that has a
  definite meaning is called a morpheme.
• It may consist of a single phoneme or a string of
  phonemes.
• A morpheme which can occur by itself is a word
• Homonyms (homophones)
• morphemes which sound the same but have different
  meanings.
• Synonyms
• morphemes which sound different but have the same
  meanings.

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Morphology

• Root
• the lexical/semantic "center" of a word the
  invariant of a group of related stems.
• Affixes
• morphemes which are added to other morphemes
  (esp. roots, stems).
• A suffix follows the root/stem.
• A prefix precedes the root/stem.
• An infix is inserted into the root/stem

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SYNTAX The rules for combining morphemes (words)
into sentences

• Syntax consists of the unconscious rules which
  govern sentence structure and the ways in which
  words are ordered within sentences.
• The basic and universal divisions of Syntax
  reflects fundamental aspects of how human
  speakers perceive the world nouns for things,
  verbs for actions and events, adjectives for
  qualities.
• The rules of syntax can be extremely complex, and
  most native-speakers are not able to cite them,
  but instinctively know how to use them
  ENCULTURATION

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WHAT MAKES UP SYNTAX?

• Phrase Structure rules How to construct proper
  phrases
• Lexical Insertion rules How to use words within
  those structures
• Transformational rules rules that apply to
  (delete, add, move elements in) phrase structure
  trees produced by Phrase Structure rules.

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Syntactic Structure

• Deep structure
• the abstract, underlying syntactic representation
  (phrase structure) of sentence, produced by
  Phrase Structure and Lexical Insertion Rules.
• Surface structure
• the syntactic representation produced by
  application of transformational rules to deep
  structure.

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Symbols

• A SYMBOL is something which is used to represent
  something else, usually a much more complex
  concept.
• We can make symbols mean anything they are
  arbitrary and their complexity is essentially
  unlimited.
• Human beings have the ability to think in
  symbols, and language is both an outgrowth of
  that ability and probably a necessary part of it
  

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Thought, Language and Society

• Sapir-Whorf
• language determines how we see the world and
  behavior
• reality is filtered through language categories

• Sociolinguistics
• social position determines the content and form
  of language

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Dialects

• A language without an army
• A way of speaking in a particular place
• e.g. Cockney
• Speakers are sometimes considered less
  intelligent
• Ebonics - dialect or language?

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Different ways of speaking depending on age,
gender, occupation and class
Language and Culture
Mother-Infant talk
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Paralanguage

• Silence
• Kinesics
• body movement, expressions
• some cultures are more touch-oriented
• eye-contact in some cultures is rude
• Dress
• Looks

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Mass Media
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Language and Change

• Colonialism was a major force of change
• Pidgins
• usually limited to trade
• National policies of assimilation
• Soviet Union
• English-only movement in the US

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The BIG Questions Revisited

• What aspects of communication do linguistic
  anthropologists study?
• How do culture, society and communication
  interact?
• What are some important factors affecting
  language change?