McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc Language and Communication Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity 11 th Edition Conrad Phillip Kottak

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2 Language and Communication What Is Language Animal Communication Nonverbal Communication The Structure of Language Language Thought and Culture Sociolinguistics Historical Linguistics

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 3 What Is Language? Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation Based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent Primary means of communication (spoken or written)

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 4 What Is Language? –Conjure up elaborate images –Discuss the past and future –Share experiences with others –Benefit from their experiences Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context Allows humans to:

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 5 Animal Communication –Automatic and cannot be combined –At some point in human development, ancestors began to combine calls and to understand the combinations Call Systems—limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 6 Animal Communication –Communication came to rely almost totally on learning –Although primates use call systems, the vocal tract is not suitable for speech Call Systems –Number of calls expanded, eventually becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through genes

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 7 Animal Communication –More recent experiments show that apes can learn to use, if not speak, true language –Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs Sign Language

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 8 Animal Communication –Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once. Washoe and Lucy exhibited several human traits SwearingJoking Telling liesTrying to teach language to others –Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family and used ASL to converse with foster parents

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 9 Animal Communication –Cultural transmission of a communication system through learning is a fundamental attribute of language –Productivity—combined two or more signs to create new expressions –Displacement—ability to talk about things that are not present Koko and the chimps show apes share linguistic ability with humans

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 10 Animal Communication Experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have rudimentary capacity for language There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 11 Animal Communication Language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems gradually transformed into language Language uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 12 Animal Communication Language Contrasted with Call Systems Insert Table 15.1

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 13 Nonverbal Communication Kinesics—study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 14 The Structure of Language –Phonology—study of speech sounds –Morphology—forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes –Lexicon—dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings –Syntax—arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences Scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 15 The Structure of Language –Phoneme—sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning –Phonetics—study of human speech sounds –Phonemics—studies only the significant sound contrasts of given language Speech Sounds

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 16 Language, Thought, and Culture The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis— grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways Noam Chomsky argues human brain contains limited set of rules for organizing language, so that all languages have common structural basis

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 17 Language, Thought, and Culture –Specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups –Vocabulary is area of language that changes most rapidly –Language, culture, and thought are interrelated Focal Vocabulary

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 18 Language, Thought, and Culture Ethnosemantics—study of how speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions The ways people divide up the world—the contrasts they perceive as meaningful or significant—reflect their experiences

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 19 Language, Thought, and Culture Focal Vocabulary for Hockey –Insert Table 15.2

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 20 Sociolinguistics Investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context Sociolinguists focus on features that vary systematically with social position and situation

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 21 Sociolinguistics –Style Shifts—varying speech in different contexts –Diglossia—regular style shifts between “high” and “low” variants of the same language We rank certain speech patterns as better or worse because we recognize they are used by groups that we also rank Linguistic Diversity

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 22 Sociolinguistics –In North America and Great Britain, women’s speech tends to be more similar to standard dialect than men’s speech Comparing men and women, there are differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body stances and movements that accompany speech

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 23 Sociolinguistics Deborah Tannen found that women typically use language and body movements to build rapport, social connections with others Men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 24 Sociolinguistics Language and Status Position –Honorifics—terms used with people, often by being added to their names, to “honor” them

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 25 Sociolinguistics –British have a more developed set of honorifics –Japanese language has several honorifics Some convey more respect than others do –Kin terms can be associated with gradations in rank and familiarity –Americans tend to be less formal than other nationalities, although they include honorifics

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 26 Sociolinguistics –We use and evaluate speech in context of extralinguistic forces—social, political, and economic –Our speech habits help determine our access to employment and other material resources Stratification

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 27 Sociolinguistics Linguistic forms, which lack power in themselves, take on the power of the groups they symbolize Bourdieu views linguistic practices as symbolic capital that properly trained people may convert into economic and social capital

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 28 Sociolinguistics Linguistic insecurity often felt by lower- class and minority speakers is result of symbolic domination

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 29 Sociolinguistics Multiple Negation (“I don’t want none”) According to Gender and Class (in Percentages –Insert Table 5.3

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 30 Sociolinguistics Pronunciation of r in New York City Department Stores –Insert Table 5.4

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 31 Sociolinguistics Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.), a.k.a. “Ebonics” –Most linguists view B.E.V. as a dialect of English rather than a separate language William Labov writes B.E.V. is “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today... ”

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 32 Sociolinguistics –B.E.V. speakers less likely to pronounce r than Standard English (SE) speakers –B.E.V. speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect B.E.V. a complex system of linguistic rules

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 33 Historical Linguistics Historical linguists reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages Long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 34 Historical Linguistics Daughter Languages—languages that descend from the same parent language and that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 35 Historical Linguistics Subgroups—languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related Protolanguage—original language from which daughter languages descend

McGraw-Hill © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 36 Historical Linguistics PIE Family Tree –Insert Figure 15.2