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