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

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