LING Exam 1

LING/ANTH Language Culture and Communication Exam 1 Binghamton

Pristine Myth

US sparsely populated before settlers, untouched landscape, Native Americans living in complete harmony with the land.

Lewis Henry Morgan

savagery → barbarism → civilization linear development. Native American more “primitive”. Study of Native American language to see the past of European. Saw NA lang as pure and less complex.

Romanticism

Savage human; pure beautiful nature

Large Native American civilizations

• Mesa Verde (cliffs, 150+ rooms)

• Lahokia (mounds)

• Mississippi 20,000+

• 53.9 mil NA before settlements

Mithun

• female, language maps

• Language from social construct and government recognition

• Lang families and protolangs

• Languages are worldviews

Printing press lang effect

Cause of common vernaculars and labelled languages

Colonialism lang

Caused sorting and categorization of languages, messy

Protolanguage

“parent” language, assumptions from studying current langs

Language Tree

shows similar words throughout many langs

Morpheme

smallest unit of form. Sound with a meaning

Phomene

Smaller than morpheme, just a sound (syllable)

do NOT

Languages ________ have the same words and the same concepts expressed through them.

Count/Noncount Nouns

English: add a/an in front of things that can be counted

Hearsay/heresy Marker

Marker showing someone else passed on the information/may be unreliable narration/uncertain of truth, Native American langs have

Linguistic Relativism

Duranti: arbitrary, cannot predict lang differences

Linguistic Functionalism

distinctions in langs based on regular use/what descriptors are needed

Linguistic Relativity

world views come from systems of speech (how we structure our thoughts and worldviews comes from how we speak)
Different ways of speaking are linked to worldview differences

Bio and Evolutionary Approach to Lang in Europe

• Language structure from biology & culture

• Organization of lang equivalent to organization of people (mental, cultural, racial)

• More morphemes = more logical (Humboldt)

John Wesley Powell

Naturalist and Geologist, classify people like flora and fauna
Lang, cult, race all linked; collected word lists

Lewis Henry Morgan

complexity is uniform across lang, culture, society, mental capability. (More complex language = more intelligent and higher level society and culture)
bullshit but they believed it

Naturalists

sought to classify

Early European View of Language Evolution

Primitive lang to evolved lang. European langs were obv the most evolved/most advanced stage. Different races (species to some) at different stages of evolution which could be seen through language complexity.

Anthropos

Human

Logia

Study

Ethnocentrism

Eval of other cultures through the standards of your own culture

Remains of Early European Views of Lang

• Race lines (w 1st and 3rd world countries)

• Terminology (developed/developing; primitive/advanced; backwards societies)

Boas

Optical properties of sea water → perceptions and wording for colors. Anti ethnocentrism! Alternating sounds, historical particularism, holism, advanced linguistic relativity, didn’t cite Native American scholars. Wrote against racism

4 Fields of Holism

• cultural

• archeology

• biological/physical

• linguistic

  Holism - look at the entire picture

Historical Particularism

fuck ethnocentrism. Every culture has its own history. It is not some weird culture evolution, it is separate unique cultures. We are limited by our own language and culture assumptions.

Salvage Anthropology

Cultural contact leads to a loss of culture. Romanticization of culture before contact (native americans specifically, staged photos). Study and record cultures before they are lost. Recorded grammar and ethnographies.

Alternating Sounds

v/w switches. People use different sounds in different languages and can therefore have difficulties discerning sounds they do not use in speech. Different sound systems for different langs

George Hunt

Native american scholar that helped Boas a great deal and was barely credited

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Thought is determined (strong) or influenced (weak) by language.
Later on scholars combined the previous scholars work into something new so many people take issue with this. Used by psycho-linguists to disprove ling relativity.

Sapir

• 1st ling anthropologist.

• Unconscious behavior is societal including lang

• Native American langs and protolangs

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Sapir student

Grammatical differences in NA langs

Cryptotypes (dif ways of speaking within one lang)

Language defines experience for speakers

Language Death

A metaphor, languages change to the point that they are unrecognizable to the previous version and could no longer be understood by one who only speaks the previous.

UNESCO Categories of Endangered

1. Safe

2. Vulnerable (only spoken at home)

3. Definitely Endangered (children do not speak it)

4. Severely Endangered (only the eldest generation speak it)

5. Critically Endangered (only a few of the eldest speak it)

6. Extinct (no living speakers)

Native Speaker

One who grew up speaking the language (learned in childhood)

Dead Language

Lang with no native speakers

Efforts to Preserve Languages

Prevention of borrowed word assimilation (french/icelandic)

all languages still borrow and invent words…still changing

NA Indigenous Language Death Stats

300-500 NA langs down to 80-175 which will reduce to 20 by 2050

Settler Colonialism

Large groups of people to dif geographical location where dominance and settlements are established. Remove indigenous peoples (genocide.). Results in lang loss.

Reasons for lang death

• Those who speak it all die (genocide, hate crimes, trail of tears)

• Forced not to speak it (1819 civilization fund, “civilize” the NA)

• Social context where a lang is useful disappears (loss of land & soc id, no one to speak it with)
  american policies have been downright evil to Native Americans and it has destroyed their languages and cultures and still today the US fails at any sort of help or support for Native Americans.

Language Revitalization

Hebrew is an example (dead → 6 mil speakers)

• Tied to land (national lang of israel)

• Uses creation and borrowing of new words

• Uses similarities

Challenges for Lang Revitalization

• Picking a language

• Picking new words for new concepts and tech

• Incentive to learn it

• Money/cost.

• Encouraging social contexts for use

Why We Revitalize Languages

Language diversity is important and offers different worldviews. Resilience and resistance to settler colonialism, fostering communities and cultural heritage.

Sir William Jones

Compared a ridiculous number of languages, late 1700s

Comparative Historical Linguistics

Genetic Diversity (Mithun), viewed as Darwinian evolutionary. Compare lang in present to predict past, comparison of present languages and historical documents.

Structural Linguistics

Study parts of lang and how they relate to each other and their meanings. Study present structure to predict past.

Ferdinand De Saussure

Swiss historical linguist, followed structuralism approach. Predicted sound systems for resent patterns. Simple signs (signifier and signified). Phonology

Parde

The way people speak

Langue

abstract mental system studied through parde

Signifier

sound image, the thing that shows something else

Signified

concept, the meaning

Morphology

study of word part systems

Phonology

study of sound systems

Syntax

study word order

Semiotics

the study of signs, meaning as a system (meaning is arbitrarily associated to Saussure signs)

Generative Linguistics

study of inherent grammatical structure. (english adj order)
Grammatical rules & categories. Search for universal grammar

Grammatical judgements

if wording is correct in the language it is spoken in

Behavioral linguistics

Speech known through conditioning/being told. Verbal behavior, start as a blank slate, B.F. Skinner

Noah Chomsky

• anti behavioral

• there is a deep structure of language that is innate and there are rules

• universal grammar, deep and surface structures

• foundation of studying linguistics

Deep structure vs. Surface structure

rules | the way people speak

Linguistic Competence

knowledge (ideal speaker)

Linguistic Performance

how one actually speaks

Generative Linguistics methods of study

grammar judgements & rules of grammar & rules underlying patterns of judgement

Sociolinguistics

social dimensions of lang use, dialects, how societal relations impact the ways people speak, Gumperz and Labov

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Sociolinguistics

qnt: social variables & ling variants, macro, generalizations, Labov
qlt: more indepth and direct, descriptive, Gumperz

Department store social stratification

Pronunciation of r’s decreased along with price (lower class/cheaper places had a greater chance of not pronouncing r’s)

Linguistic Anthropology

Boas, Qualitative, long term participant observation, understanding culture through language use keeping in mind that social identities are fluid and constructed through language use

Prof’s Ling Anth Research

Indian call center accent training

18 months over 5 yrs
social and linguistic categories for successful calls

Society

network of partial understandings that is upheld by communicative acts and made by every day interactions

Sapir

republican party- constant change, exists through communication

everything culture and society is through various forms of communication, social suggestion, use language to understand unconscious patterns of social behavior

Explicit

directly stated

Implicit

implied

Communication

ways of imparting information, speech, gesture (intonation), social suggestion

Social Suggestion

least direct/explicit form of communication, known social rules for which the reasoning is never explained, it is just known (church, rainbows)

Gesture

Body language, intonation, sarcasm, tone, what makes up the difference between words and actual meaning.

Sapir Unconscious

At the level of society, what society as a whole causes without a reason why, social behavior

Individual vs. Social Behavior

2 lenses to view behavior, one person vs. societal, difference lays in how behavior is perceived, both have form & function

Form

how something is done, the way something is done

Function

why something is done, the reason

Saussure Sign

signs are building blocks of meaning. arbitrary pair of signifier and signified, no reasoning for why signs exist/are created, no references to physical objects

Signifier

sound-image, word

Signified

actual thing (object/concept) being defined

CS. Peirce Sign

representamen, object, interpretant; enregisterment, signs are constantly repeated and fluid and can get new meanings
“A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.”

Representamen

sign vehicle, thing representing, word, image of (stop sign)
stands for something else, connects the object to ground

Object

thing represented (needing to stop)

Interpretant

interpretation of the signal

Quali-sign

qualities (soft/hard, loud/quiet)

Sin-sign

individual things (chair)

Legi-sign

types, categories

Symbol

sign that is arbitrarily linked to its meaning, no physical connection (words)

Index

sign that is related to its meaning, a causal relationship (smoke & fire)

Icon

sign that is physically representative of its meaning, a replica of the object (emojis, pictures)

3 Degrees of Peirce Signs

1. Replicates physical world, quali, icon

2. Related to physical world, sin, index

3. Arbitrary, legi, symbol

Drinks and signs

Drinks reinforce ideas of class and gender, creates a material structure for social interaction

Dialectology

study of dialects

generalizable, does not tell how varieties are used in everyday circumstances, helps with study on peoples interactions, studies ideological things that are defined by society more so than actual differences

Dialect

lang variation particular to a region or social group

Variationist Sociolinguistics

interested in lang variation