Linguistic Anthropology

1
Linguistic Anthropology

• Language and Culture

2
Language in Action

• Beyond language to speech
• Language in context
• Ethnography of Communication
• Communicating across cultures.

3
Language in Context

• Context cultural and social situation
• How does context affect language?
• Malinowski (1884-1942)
• Translation requires knowledge of context
• Context can shift meanings
• Recognizing indirection
• Asking for a ride
• Saying no.

4
Communicative Competence

• Ability to speak a language well
• Ability to use your language correctly
• In a variety of social situations
• Compare with Linguistic Competence
• Ability to produce (and recognize) grammatically
  correct expressions
• Chomskys ideal speaker
• Not distracted by environment.

5
Some Environmental Distractions

• When bad means good
• When two positives make a negative
• Greetings and address terms
• Ty and vy, du and Sie
• Hello / Hi / Sup!
• How do you learn these rules?
• Ethnography of Speaking.

6
Ethnography of Speaking

• Developed in 1960s by Dell Hymes
• Focus on language in total cultural context
• How people use language in real situations
• Communicative competence
• S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G
• Speech communities
• The importance of fieldwork
• What are the rules for speaking?
• For not speaking?
• How do children learn the rules?.

7
Ethnography of SPEAKING

• Setting/Situation/Scene
• Where?
• Participants
• Who are the speakers?
• Who can speak?
• Who should speak?
• Ends
• What are the goals?
• Bargaining
• Asking for (and giving) directions
• Report-talk vs rapport-talk.

8
Ethnography of SPEAKING

• Act Sequence
• Exactly what gets said?
• Speech Acts
• Promises, commands, apologies
• Speech Events
• Exchanging greetings, telling jokes, giving
  speeches
• Status and type or order of greetings
• Speech Situations
• Classrooms, conferences, parties, ceremonies
• Key
• Tone of voice, manner of delivery
• Mourning, joking, irony, teasing.

9
Ethnography of SPEAKING

• Instrumentalities
• Languages dialects
• Mutual intelligibility
• Politics and attitudes languages and their
  speakers
• Ideas about Standard and Non-standard
• warsh fouath flouah pahking the cah
• A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
• Registers
• Situation-specific
• Prestigious, formal, scientific, academic,
  colloquial
• Politics and attitudes about registers and their
  use

10
Ethnography of SPEAKING

• Norms
• Expectations
• Speaking vs silence
• Directness vs indirectness
• Lying vs politeness
• Taking turns and interrupting
• Taboos and avoidances
• Genres
• Kinds of speech acts or events
• Lectures, Poetry Readings, Joking, Gossip.

11
Speech Communities Linguistic Communities

• A speech community is
• A group of people who share
• One or more varieties of language
• And the rules for using them in interaction
• A linguistic community is
• A group of people who share
• A single language variety
• And who identify with that language variety
• A community of practice is ???.

12
Rules in Speech/Linguistic Communities

• Are a part of the communitys culture
• Are different in different communities
• Can be learned/studied in the field.

13
Language Across Cultures

• Different communities different rules
• Easy for misunderstandings to occur
• Rich Points
• Moments of misunderstanding
• Interviewing for a job
• Asking for a ride
• Signal differences in rules
• Ways to say no
• Ways to take turns
• Indirectness.

14
Cross Cultural Repairs

• Michael Agars MAR
• Recognize/acknowledge Mistake in using rules
• Can also think of Mistake as Miscue
• Develop Awareness of different rules
• Ethnography of Communication as a method
• Repair understanding of rules
• Finding appropriate ways to say no
• Learning to take turns without interrupting
• Hearing and responding to a request for a ride.

15
Creating a Language Difference in Action

• Identify some different linguistic situations
• formal/informal, teasing/serious
• Or identify a difference in identity
• male/female, Senior/Junior, major/non-major
• choose a way for your language to index (mark,
  indicate, signal) these differences
• degrees of loudness?
• Specific words only used by one group?
• Specific words only used in certain situations?

16
Creating a Language Politeness

• create a greeting
• create a farewell
• taboo one of the words in your lexicon
• why did you taboo this word?
• create a euphemism for it
• why did you choose this euphemism?.