JM

Chapter 11: Language and Culture

Linguistic Anthropology

  • Linguistic anthropology- the study of the relationship between language and culture or the study of how language interacts with and shapes social structure and culture
  • Kinship terms- In English, organizes relationships by blood and marriage, as well as gender
    • English: daughter, mother, son, father, step-sibling, etc.
    • Studying kinship terms in a specific language can help us ascertain what characteristics the speakers value or consider relevant to social organization
  • Communicative competence- the ability to interact and communicate according to cultural norms
  • Politeness: different politeness strategies are used in different languages and cultures, ranging from lexical, pragmatic, and morphological levels
  • Speaker roles: different roles have different expectations
  • Turn-taking rules: alternation of turns and pausing before responding
    • Tag questions- utterances beginning with statements that end with a question to another speaker
    • Adjacency pairs- pairs of adjacent utterances produced by two different speakers in which the first utterance provokes the hearer to respond with the second utterance
  • Greetings: different greetings are appropriate for different receivers of the greeting

Language and Thought

  • Linguistic relativity- a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition
    • Linguistic determinism- hypothesizes that speakers of a language can think of things only in the way that their language expresses them
    • Language is used to classify out experiences in the world
    • Whorf hypothesis- essentially states that the language someone speaks affects how they perceive the world
    • Linguistic relativity has been investigated through color and spatial relationships
    • Language and thought are NOT completely separate

Language and Power

  • Language can act as indicators of power relations and to exert power over entire communities or societies
    • A speaker can make direct statements to indicate power
    • “Do this/ do that” commands
    • Prosody and volume can also indicate power
    • Raised voice and enunciation
    • Word choice can impact the power relations in communities and societies
    • Laws can be written or spoken to assign power
    • Government figures, monarchs, etc

Politeness

  • Politeness- normative or expected linguistic and extralinguistic strategies culturally agreed to be interactionally appropriate for a given situation
  • Strategies:
    • Indirect speech acts
    • Honorifics- grammatical markers of respect and deference
    • T/V distinction- distinguishing second-person pronouns in terms of social distance or intimacy
  • Face theory
    • Face: positive self-image (to lose face)
    • Face-threatening acts (FTA): speech acts that may threaten one’s positive or negative face
    • Bald on-record FTA: no politeness strategy is used
    • Positive politeness: oriented toward positive face wants
    • Negative politeness: oriented towards the hearer’s desire to be left alone
    • Off-record FTA: indirect speech acts that avoid making any explicit or unequivocal imposition on the hearer

Ethnography

  • Fieldwork- going to specific communities where a language variety is spoken in order to gather information about the speech community and language itself
  • Ethnography- a description of everyday life in the community
    • Researchers spend @@months or years in a community@@ before considering their descriptions complete
    • How do speakers greet one another or end their interactions?
    • What registers/genres are used by different social groups?
    • What politeness strategies are generally used, and do they differ based on context and/or speaker roles?
    • How do speakers classify animals, colors, kin, and other objects in the physical world?
  • Participant observation- systemically observing within a community in order to understand how and why people do the things they do on a daily basis
    • Passive participation- passively watching how everyday life unfolds without partaking in any local activities in order to cause the least disturbance possible to the daily routine of the community being studied
    • Complete participation- the researcher actively participates in the community, attempting to see first hand how the community functions from the point of view of a local
  • Etic description- an objective, outsider’s point of view
  • Emic description- an insider’s description