linguistic anthropology

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Whatever one calls it, this field has had a major impact in the studies of visual perception (especially colour) and bioregional democracy, both of which are concerned with distinctions that are made in languages about perceptions of the surroundings.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that their language employs six different and distinct words, all of whose best English translation is "we"^{[citation needed]}. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to types of societies and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colours of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment must make, leading to situated knowledge and perhaps a situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we".

linguistics - from wiki [to read later...]

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.^[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.

The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the systems of rules that are followed by speakers or a language. It encompassesmorphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds, nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how language users make the inferences required to understand another's speech, how meaning is assigned and processed, and ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).

Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change;sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.

Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy,neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.

Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studied

Alongside the structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics. These fields are distinguished by the kinds of nonlinguistic factors that they consider:

• Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
• Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
• Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
• Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
• Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
• Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
• Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
• Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
• Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
• Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
• Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
• Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

Semiotics is not a discipline within linguistics; rather, it investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.

History

Main article: History of linguistics

Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).

Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, however, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.

Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socratesintroduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.^[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography,dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.^[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.^{[citation needed]}

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.^{[citation needed]}

Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.

In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); andJohannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. nonhistorical) explanations for language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field ofanthropology in the United States,^[20][21] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.

Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced byLeonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such asTransformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar(LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.

[edit]Schools of study

There are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.

[edit]Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar

During the last half of the 20th century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. Formal linguistics remains the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,^[22] though Chomsky's writings have also gathered much criticism.

[edit]Cognitive linguistics

Main article: Cognitive linguistics

In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics posit that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been the subject of much criticism.^[23] In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics includecognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from embodied experienceconstitute the basic units of language.

things to ponder

I think I've made a good new goal for myself... I think. I want a job that doesn't plaster me behind a computer all day. So I've thought about it here & there... and so... there's anthropology/archaeology which could be really fun because of all the travel, there's also writing - something I've always loved, and finally teaching - being a professor which even of the above two choices [and maybe even architecture] could work.

It's amazing how draining a 9 to 5 can be... and not to mention how ultimately boring. I think working at Jenny Craig and being a camp counselor were probably at least a million times more exciting than what I'm sitting through now. This whole idea of rotting away in some rickety chair, sunken behind autocad really scares the shit out of me. I do have a future vision for myself... I understand that right now I might be looking forward to living in Boston or Cape Cod... and that might change... it's probably likely to change. But if I have the chance to change my day-to-day situation, my conversations, and my ability to walk around... I'm going to go for it now. I don't want to get out of undergrad and do this sort of thing for five years before I am regretting never stepping out of this box. Maybe I should have known long ago this was going to happen when I chose architecture... but actually architecture school is probably one of the best decisions I've made. It's made me a hard worker, a tough problem solver, to be creative, artistic, curious, and dedicated to something - even if it's not my personal calling. I have to be convinced that taking these four years at rpi wasn't a waste... I mean I don't think it has been. I went to a tough school, was enrolled in probably the most mentally and physically challenging program and now I can go on to face things in a completely different light from other people. I got to go through this experience with an awesome class that all of my professors adore, and I've upheld a good standing in the class. I had the opportunity to travel to Rome, where my interest in the ancient world and walking for eight hours a day came about. I've excelled in the construction drawings classes, with lessons that are at the true heart of architecture. And furthermore, I've excelled as a one-person team in DD... the toughest studio and most respected class the school has to offer... the class that firms hiring rpi students look at when they evaluate future candidates for hire. All of these things I've gotten in the bag because I chose to challenge myself at rpi. Even when I feel belittled because of everything that goes on day-to-day in studio, even when I feel behind because my graphic skills aren't as far ahead of everyone as they used to be, even when I feel like my style is changing, my preferences aren't what they used to be and I don't know what to do, how to redefine myself... at least I've taken this leap and gone through these four tough years.

So, my third thought for this entry was supposed to be about what my 'ideal' grad school experience would be, but I'm getting sort of drained from the whole nine-hour day thing [ I go into work at 8, so technically its an 8 to 5 for me right now ]. Basically I've been thinking that for grad school somewhere like BU might be perfect for me. I can keep my hopes up and wish for Harvard, but even with distinction on my diploma it's not going to be guaranteed that they'll want me. What's more is the coursework might be something I don't want to repeat after going through architecture school and wasting myself senior year of high school. I also like that BU is a big school with tons of departments, awesome study abroad programs, [it's in Boston... even though Harvard is, too... it's still a plus], and I could hopefully meet some decent people [even though I'm sure I could run with the conversation at Harvard]. So all-in-all I want to be in a great place, with fun people, to have work but not drown in it, and maybe begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel for a job and a future I would be comfortable in.

Ahh, okay I'm going to stop for now I'm not even paying attention to this and my back is sore... and really this is just more looking at a computer. Enough is enough!

- c

... fell asleep beneath the flowers

I want to simultaneously design future buildings and study/ explore what has existed for centuries.


- c

daydream

Today during lunch I completely zoned out. We were having a lecture on "leed" [ which is a huge bunch of bullshit if you ask me ]... but was a topic that the older people in the office were really heated about. The lady partner who I've never even met before was up, and boy did she have alot of snarky comments to make... not to mention corrections about almost anything people were saying. Then, there was the grumpy partner sitting at the front who also interjected at every other opportunity... also to correct everyone on what they were saying. Through all of this jibber-jabber and back-lashing comments I started to drift off into a daydream.

In my future do I really want to sit around a huge table discussing leed with grammar-crazy maniacs? Do I really care about the equations for the amount of airflow through a building and which way it should be calculated? Do I really care to work under a bitchy old woman and a grumpy old man?

Not really...

I mean maybe it's just because this is a firm made up of mostly older people... people who would rather be down at their Florida office, doing some work, but more just reaping the benefits of a cheap crew. Maybe it's just these people who want to be rich and don't really care about the quality or looks of what they are producing... well I guess the 'quality' is good.. but most of the work really looks like a mcdonald's playground. And I'm not just saying this to bash these people... they are doing something with their lives... but it's just something I don't want to be stuck with. I'm scared of being stuck with. I mean it's a step up from being in some bullshit product company, or managing who knows what for noone you'll ever meet. It's probably better than number crunching, too, although the people from Ellis finance are good company and interesting people.

But caught up in this daydream I saw that my future would be made up of meetings like these... in offices probably not too different from this one. It was coming down to the conversation I want to have everyday... to the people I want to be surrounded with. And would this conversation get better as I got older? Would it be better at a different firm? Or would it still be stingy, intellectually annoying bickering about leed points and airflow? If my days were filled doing site visits, or walking around verifying things... trust me, I would be happy. Beyond happy... I would feel at home.  But if I have to sit and listen to people argue for the validity of leed or sit around a boardroom waiting for one person to look up an airflow equation, then I swear - I quit. I don't want this sort of thing to last longer than this five-week break.

Now, I don't want to completely blow this place out of the water. There are some decent people at my work. I think it's just the atmosphere they all participate in. No one seems to talk to one another, and everyone is especially on-edge when the partners are around. I'm also getting the feeling that they aren't so welcoming to newcomers. A couple of the people in the firm are relatives, and all of the partners went to rpi together... so they are sort of a tight-knit group already... maybe that's what also makes me feel sort of impermanent. But all-in-all even if this isn't the best fit for me, I'm soooo thankful to have been given this experience. Seeing Ellis hospital was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. To learn just how complex hospitals really are blows my mind... they are a small city, with people rushing in from the cold on one side of a wall, to someone getting laser-eye surgery or being treated in trauma 1 on the other side. It's amazing to me how many machines and people are always buzzing around these places... I understand a hospital as a living organism now... always changing and always full of life.... it does of course have its moments of silence... the OR for example... when time froze as I saw four people cloaked from heat-to-toe in their sea-green scrubs... they all walked swiftly with the coattails falling behind them, and all looked at me and Angelo as they passed into the electric sliding doors and down the huge OR corridor. It was like seeing superheros, or some strange, amazing intelligent humans grace you with their presence... only for a second though, before they passed into doors that very few people will ever see. So.... sorry, that was sort-of off topic, but I think you get the point - walking around the hospital was an eye-opening experience. I feel like I completed med school in two days after seeing everything I did. But ahhh, what to do when I'm not the person hired to walk around with funny people from finance... what happens when I become the cad monkey and sit-in on lunches about leed and listen to my superiors argue over things I don't think even make sense in the first place?

- c

edgar allen poe

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.


Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.


I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.


It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.


It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.


Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.


That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.


The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?


The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true


The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.


There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.


There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.


Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'