Linguistic Anthropology

1. Where did language come from?

- Why is it so complicated?
- How did it come to be?

2. How does language work?

- What are its functions?
- What tasks do we perform with language?
- What do we do with it?

3.

Language, Culture, Society

DEFINE LANGUAGE
Language is a structure of expectations

Is English inherently tied to American culture? To what extent?

If there is an inherent relationship between American institutions and English, what does this mean for other
institutions? (other English speaking countries)

What is my linguistic biography?

What languages?

Culture: A body or a group of learned practices shared by a group, guides behavior, and exists on conscious
and unconscious levels

Why do different people do things so differently?

- Tendency for media to talk about subconscious culture and negative

Linguistic Anthropology: Rooted in ethnographic field work

- Different domains of social life reinforce on another in unexpected ways
- Different areas of culture can be connected
- We suspend judgment while figure out what is going on: bracket things and view them in the
moment and by themselves without judgement

Society: explicit laws, institutional (social bodies with members) – rules about who can belong and who cannot
– can also exists in tribal societies, e.g. age, gender groupings

Folk theories of language: popular conception about language that we do not subject to scientific investigation,
language ideology - Crucial to how we conduct our day to day affairs
- Common ideologies, e.g. unclear writing leads to an unclear mind. E.g. Ability to speak
grammatically means that you are more intelligent, e.g. ability to speak more than one language
are more intelligent
- Where do these folk beliefs come from?
- Translation is problematic + you can never properly translate a language (capture its essence)

- People can speak the language and understand another linguistically, but intent and meaning can be
misunderstood
- Language Ideology: speaking different languages is a problem – draws a circle too small around
language… simply grammar and vocabulary
- Language and culture are much more linked than we commonly believe
- People believe that because another may not speak that same language as them, they are somehow
missing something

Sir William Jones Methodology: All culturally history ultimately comes from Sanskrit
 - Got different words and compared them across languages – viewed language as simply vocabulary

Ferdinand de Saussure
- Argued that historical linguistics was diachronic, and proposes that we stop this and focus on
synchronic linguistics (present tense approach to language)
- Language is like chess: all the pieces work and move together

Conventional relationship
Every sign (letter) is comprised of two faces: outward face and inward face
e.g. Signifier: Tree = what it points to

No intrinsic/necessary relationship between the sign and object, but not because there are different words for tree
in other language

Saussure’s concepts (swiss linguist)

- Language can be thought of organisms that evolve through time

- Languages are more than just vocabulary terms, they have to be used in reality
- Wants to make linguistics a serious science
- Synchronic: language in the present, dismiss the past
- Wants to distinguish between Langue: language + Parole: Speech – wants to get at the langue: the
underlying structure of language
- Parole is full of errors, therefore we shouldn’t be focusing on that, and rather we should be focusing on
langue
- How do you get to langue without going through parole
- Signifier: the word, Signified: the outward facing, actual object - conventional relationship, we create
the concepts. The signifier points to the concept of the tree
- It is a mistake to think that the concepts in every language are going to be the same, if that were the
case, translation would be simple (e.g. one word in English may have many meanings and words in
another language)
Saussarian “value”
- French: mouton
- English: sheep/mutton (lamb) - different words for live and cooked sheep (English pulls out separate
treatment for food of animals)

When a signifier is caused by the signified, the sign is called idexical

When signifiers suggest the meaning of the signified, because the sound resembles the thing that it means, the
sign is called iconic

Paradigmatic & Syntagmatic

- Saussure is interested in paradigmatic
- Must be aware of both in order to combine words together to make plausible sentence
- Sentence is a sequence of signs, and within the context of the sentence each sign contributes to the
meaning of the sentence
- When you think about the signs in a linear way, that is the syntagmatic (e.g. “she can go”) - When you
start with a word, you limit the amount of words that follow (e.g. when you start with the word “she”, a
word like “garbage” will not follow. More likely following word will be a verb) –
- Paradigmatic, thinking about each slot in the sentence that contains other possible words that you
could substitute into the slot to also make sense – a word contains many other words in its paradime
(somewhat like synonyms)
- Syntagmatic is horizontal, paradigmatic is vertical

Franz Boas
- Boas identified that language developed through culture
- Called for good ethnography
- Coined the term ethnocentrism: evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in
the standards and customs of one's own culture
 - Boasian linguistics: emphasizes describing the culture of a specific group at a particular moment in time
– synchronic in Saussures despcription
- Focused on content (culture) rather than stuructre
- Argue that in order to get at the culture, you must learn the language
- Sees language as a way to get to culture (“a personal experience”)
- Views all languages as being of equal complexity (Chinese may be hard for a speaker of one language
to learn, but may be easier for others) – called for people to evaluate differences as expressions of
slternate systems , rather than evaluating them against American or European systems of research.. does
not mean you are abandoning your moral standards by doing so
- Interested in a relative linguistics (not deterministic)
- Fundamental argument: there is no way for us to determine that one language is better than another or
even that on language is more complicated than another
- Interested in scientifically collecting how these languages operate
- Worked with Native American people to preserve their languages (did so by taking recordings) – keep
the language alive and remembered
-
- Worked with children of European immigrants
o If race determines behavior, these kids would behave the same way that their parents behaved,
not the case
o Race is not the determining factor for behavior, instead language and culture determine
behavior (social setting)

Leonard Bloomfield: language structure, not context of language in society and culture, offshoot of Boas, but
was not anthropologist
Edward Sapir: Took Boaz concept and built on it.
Notices that language is important for how
Edward Sapir was a student of whorf
Warf interested in language and how it guides our behavior and
Warff works with indigenous languages and compares them to SAE (Standard European languages)

In order to understand the word cat, you need to understand it in relation to other words (e.g. dog) + positive
qualities of each word. In orer to understand what a cat is, you need to understand what it is not

A cat is as much what it isn’t as what it is

You need to know a words relation to other words: value

Significance part of quiz: how these term lead to the development of other words

Boas – Supir – Warff

Whorf:

- Language structures habitual thought, languages are never fully reducible to one another (no such thing
as complete translation)
- Language shapes habitual thought)
- Questioned whether speakers of two different lagnuaegs see the world the same way: e.g. Hopi
language does not attribute time to verbs like English does. So do the way time goes on in their world
different?
- Whorf, like Boas focused on culture perspective
- Whorf looked at grammar and vocabulary differently. He noticed the differences in grammar and
vocabulary use across languages and attributed these to significant culture
- Thought that language shapes the way you see the world and your perspective and reality: Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis – linguistic determinism… language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit
and determine cognitive categories
- … how do you test this if you are trapped in ti? People are able to translate. How can you talk about the
meanings of a language at all then? Linguistic determinism dead
- Linguistic relativity: your language lays down habitual patterns of seeing and thinking and talking when
you learn its grammar and vocab. It is not impossbiel to change these habits and
English does not mark the gender of nouns

Aspect:

Tense: past, present future

Mood:
Aspect: is the action ongoing or completed

(learn different tenses in English + other languages)

(quality of verbs)

Mood in Verb is the speakers feeling towards the verb

Greek deals more with aspect

Hopi deals more with mood

Running statement of possibility (could have run, could be running)

Running statement of fact from memory (she is probably running)
Running definitively stated (he is definitely running) – evidentiary statement

Different languages have creeaed concrete ways of translating time

English: tell time with concrete objects (unlike hopi)

Malinowski: starts notion of fieldwork

The way to understand language is to understand the situation it occurred in (context of situation)
It is sifficvult to sumply translate because language is tied up in the situation, therrefor if you are trying to
translate you need to find a corresponding situation in another language to be able to understand
Agrees with the notion of sanctity of culture, his view of language is need to look in the particular circumstance
of its circulation – what is the actual context of use (opposite of Saussure) – different inflections may mean
different things
Discourse: naturally occurring language
Discourse analysis
Looking at language in its natural habitat

Noam Chomsky:
- Doesn’t care about context of circulation, critical of Boasian linguistics
- Interested in deep underlying structure, transformational-generative grammar
- Wants to understand foundation of language and use
- Theory: transformational grammar/generative grammar – all languages can distilled down to a set of
lowest common denominators, and they’re basically the same, rules of combination, grammar is finite
set of rule for an infinite number of sentence

- Not interested in day to day conversation

- Believes the human brain is hardwired for language (he became useful for neuroscience)
- “Children learn language very quickly”, if it’s all about the environment how does this happen?
- It cannot be just about the environment
- Bewleives that human grammar is too difficult to just learn through listening and that there must be a
device in our brain (Language Aquistition Device) that gives us a natural propensity to organize the
language that we hear – language aquisition
- How can children bang out the grammatical structure of language when there are grammatical errors in
how people speak? Because language already lives in your brain.
- Thinks about language in a different ways from other
- Competence and performance
- Competence: Maps almost perfectly to Saussure’s concept of langue. Underlying structure
- Performance: parole
- Chomsky and Saussure map on to each other
- Noam changed linguistics to a mathematical theory that analyses the mind
 - Noam dismisses linguistic relativity
- he describes  'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property
or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances.   In short, competence involves
“knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. 
- According to him, competence is the ideal speaker-hearer's knowledge of his or her
language and it is the 'mental reality'
Performance is rarely a reflection of mental competence
Therefore, because of this, he believes that a theory of language should be a theory of competence,
Competence enables native speaker to recognize ambiguous sentences or accept even apparently
meaningless sentences as syntactically correct

Why is it important to make a distinction between competence and performance?<br />It allows those
studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the
language. 

the terms ‘performance’ (Chomsky) and ‘parole’ (de Saussure) can be used almost interchangeably, their
counterparts ‘competence’ and ‘langue’ are quite different from each other.<br />‘Langue’ is a static
system of signs, whereas ‘competence’is understood as a dynamic concept, as a mechanism that will
generate language endlessly.<br />Chomsky’s theory is more psychological.<br />

What’s happening when communication takes place?

The languages you speak in a given situation, shape your capacity to experience the

Quiz: (end of next week)

Take outlines
Detailed
3 CPP questions
Can do point form, drawing,

7-10 points for definition

Significance of concept!! Why the concept is important? Tie it to another concept in the course, how was
impactful to linguistics, how it fits into lineage. MAKE AN ARGUMENT

Relativism

Frames:
Frame is a metaphor, think about linguistics about having a frame around it
The frame sourrounds the situation you are in and are different for sdifferent situations. Certain frames are
appropriate for an interaction and some aren’t
Emphasizes the boundaries of a situation
Frames tells you what to focus on
Frame is a structure of expectations
Frames bring language and culture together
Set up for what is appropriate
Lingustic communtication
When frames don’t match up along languages, we can perceive other people to be rude
More important that grammar and vocabulary
Frames are dynamic
Frames can be negotiated, can also change overtime
Not just about the speaker, but the listener also has a frame, they have to know how to react/ recpection
Jokes include many different frames
Often multiple frames in play
By analyzing frames in different situations, you can analyze the cultures involved
One way to know that a frame has shifted is when the behavior shifts e.g. vocabulary choice, pronunciation,
grammer, tone of voice, topic, body language, code switching

Hymes SPEAKING ACRONYM helps you identify the frame

Sociolinguistics: Interested at looking at the relationship between the form of language and the function of
language - how the structure of what we say has to do with the structure of society
- reaction to Chomsky
Gender:
- Difference in the way men and women communicate
- Men are more likely to interrupt, introduce new topics into conversation, characterized as not having
listened well (by themselves frequently)
- Women: Make more listening sounds
- Given these different attributes of language use, can we learn about the difference between men and
women in society.
Critique of sociolinguistic by anthropology: Assume the social category… “let’s assume there are these genders
and these races” – they create social categories through the language

Kinds of signs (relationship between signifier and signified): - Charles Saunders-Purse (pg. 40-42 Agar)
Icon: the relationship between signifier and signified involves resemblance, pictographic representation - culture
still involved, need to know how to read those pictures/signs. Onomatopoeia – different in different cultures.
Index: when signifier points to the signified – one thing leads to another. Smoke is indexically leads to a fire.
Symbol: Index is a highly localized form of index.

Evolution
Fascination to see where language came from:
- Experiments to see what language was first: Herodotus placed babies alone in a hut to see how they
would form language
- Kids raised by wolves in India: inability to speak and comprehend language
- Genie: never able to master language above a certain level
There is a critical period of language development, and during these years’ humans need to be exposed to
language

No communicative system of equal complexity to human language

Animals can communicate though:

- A lot of what we perceive to be animal communication is in-fact projection – we want our animal to say
something so we look for clues that they are
- Experimentaion of animal communication is still important

Features that we have found in human language that is present in animal communication
- Displacement: you can talk about things that are not very close to you – can talk about this that are
removed in space and time.
o Allows you to develop a theory of mind: what is this other person thinking?
- Recursive: imbedded clauses within each other – a sentence within a sentence
NO arbitrariness of the sign: have indexical communication

Where language resides in the brain? – Chomsky

- Language Acquisition Device
Are there languages in the world that could help us understand the evolution of language?
- No missing link because most languages are already very complicated

Ability to speak is highly evolved:

- Tongue, lungs, lips, throat, larynx
- Evident through fossil data
o Larynx bone in throat
o Larynx leaves mark on hyoid bone, so can tell how high or low the larynx was - if mark on
hyoid bone low, more likely spoke
- Relationship between tool making and the production of language

Theories that language developed from sexual or work grunts

Places you can derive data for language from:

- Language deficits (e.g. autism)
- Paleoanthropology – fossil data/ archaeology
- Ethology- study of animal behavior
- Evolutionary theory
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Anatomy and Physiology

1. In order to study linguistics, we’re calling on a wide series of academic disciplines

- Therefore, calling on different kinds of data and sources
2. In order to answer question of where language came from, need to go back and forth between past and present
- Hyoid bone as example: compare it to the markings on the hyoid bone now and from old fossils
- Speech disorders: can look
3. Asking where language came from demands that we have certain assumptions about what language is

Paul Broca:
Determined that lesions in the front left hemisphere resulted in linguistic deficits about 99% of time
- Damage to Broca’s area results in difficulties in speech production (and motor control)
- Difficulty with grammar (drop suffix’s and prefix’s)
- First person to associated particular parts of brain to particular functions
Wernicke’s Area:
- Rear left hemisphere of brain
- Difficulties in language comprehension
- Grammar and vocabular (semantics: what words mean) - difficulties with semantics

Tend to fix on cortex when talk about language

Hydrocephaly:
- Hydrocephalic (flow of cerebral spinal fluid is impaired) – brain does not develop properly
- For some children, cortex doesn’t develop
- Many children with severe hydrocephaly have IQ’s above 100

Why is language so complicated?

Ethology
Birds:
- Calls: innate – danger calls, calls to congregate
- Songs: non-innate – need to learn from other birds
o Each note is meaningless unless strung in a sequence of different notes
o Like human language: made of individual sounds that need to be put together
- White Crowned Sparrow has a range of different song (dialects) depending where live

When talking about where language came from, often forget to include culture – how may have language helped
us survive from a social standpoint?
Like humans, these birds too need to acquire language at a critical point in life otherwise they will never learn it

Humans also have ‘calls’: baby hunger and pain cries

Animal Communication

Cannot be creative in sign use – need to be taught pre-existing signs

Incapable of displacement of time (Patterson claims that Michael has talked about the past)
Incapable of grammar

Nim Chimpsky
- Tried to teach him sign language
- Claims that chimp was simply signing until he got the sign that he wanted
- Will not use sign language by themselves
- Clever Hance Phenomenon

Clever Hance Phenomenon

- Give horse meth problem, and horse will paw until reach correct answer – in reality, trainer was
signaling to horse by tapping until got the right number

Across the board, agree that animals do not have language- however animal research proceeds, because animals
do have sophisticated cognitive abilities

Tend to anthropomorphize: put a human characteristic and voice onto an animal (in cartoons)

Can teach us about language evolution

In order to talk about language, you need to have a definition of what language is

Shared thought in a social context (broad definition of language)

If you define language too narrowly, clear that only humans have these capacities

Animal Language Experiments (70’s + 80’s)

- Experimentation to teach animals to speak - lab based
- Most animal communication study now is listening to animals int heri natural habitat
- Teach forms of human communication – humans doing teaching
- Very little transferring (learn to generate sentences that they’ve never encountered before – ability in
humans at 24 months)
Challenges lab-based animal communication experimentation
- High degrees of training
o Claim that trained to do certain routines – repetition, takes years
o Little going on outside of strictly controlled base
- Skills of non-human primates compared to that of human children
- Syntax/Grammar: set of rules governing combination of elements
o Complementation
o Coordination: plus sign between sentence
o Revitalization
o Recursion: multiple clauses, ongoing sentences
- Nothing past complementation
- Unable determine that symbols used has sub-components
o Phonemes: sub-component sounds that add to something larger (historic: duality of patterning
or multiplicity of patterning)
- Word constructions are associated with certain routines
o Humans can break all the words into a sentence and understand whereas animals cannot
- Metalanguage (performance)
o Language about language – all human communication depends on metalanguage
o Characterizing language and talking about their talk, e.g. “she talks very fast”
o We know what is appropriate
- Sign
o Nothing more than indexicality (pointing to things)
Sue Savage-Rumbauge
Look at animals in natural habitat and develop out instruments better
- Maybe we are unable to see that they are understanding
A bee has some sort of grammar because they are able to piece together colour shape odour

Need to do a localized analysis of how color is perceived in a language

Hard to place a language on an evolutionary scale
Spaghetti Junction Theory
Ameba Theories – depend on increasing specificity of reference (difficult to simple)

Pidgins, inform us on how language change happens in particular with language contact
Languges can change fast or slow
Pidgins and Creoles don’t provide us with a missing link
People that use pidgins and Creoles are just as sophisticated another language users
A system of communication that has grown up or developed among people that do not share a common languge,
however those two groups of people need to communicate (typically trade)
- No investment in learning the others persons language
1850 – first written record of word ‘pidgin’ – need to avoid stereotypes of pidgin language
NOT the result of degeneration, break down of language
NOT an adult version of baby talk
NOT the result of, laziness, corruption, primitive thought processes, mental deficiencies
Highly creative adaptations of natural languages
- Pidigins have structures and rules. Provides create demonstration of what language looks like when
need to evolve quickly

Have limited vocab

Reduced grammatical structure
Much narrower functional range
A pidgin is no-ones native language – each person has another language
Almost all pidigins are based in European languages - English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese
Often pidgins don’t last very long, and if they do, they have been recorded
Often die out when the need that called them into being dies out
One side may learn the others language
When a group of speakers start speaking a pidgin full time, in becomes a creole
Linguafranka
Some pidgins become institutionalized without becoming a fully fledged creole, may be used in media

Where do you draw the line between a pidgin and a creole?

- Degree of vocabulary and grammatical complexity (the extent to whether it is spoken full tiem or not)
- And political decision

Creoles
- A pidgin that has become the main language of a community
- Principle means of communication
- Switch from involves an expansion of linguistic resources
- Pidgin was developed to handle one small set of circumstance, whereas a creole has to handle day to
day demands
- Creoles are not auxiliary languages
- Status of creoles is almost categorically lower than the standard of standard languages
- Slavery – plantation languages – often creole speakers
- Often creole speakers feel the need to become more European (decreolization)
- Hyper creolization, decreolization
- Many strands of creoles
- A person born in the new world

Polygenetic view of pidgins:

- 2-3 languages come together in a particular situations
 - Probel: when you start to look across pidgin, start to see that the underlying structure of pidgins are
pretty different
- 1 source hypothesis: proposes the reason pidgins are similar is because of portuges – portugese people
tog et to manyy places across the world
- Similary may exists be ause language is encoded in the human brain in the same way across locations
(Darwin and Compsky)
- Curbs cuts – is a structure that is provided for one purpose but ends up becoming useful for many other
circumstances (bikerton argues that the brain works this way with language) – argues that human
languge is always encoded in same in brain

Amoeba theory:
Language traced back to instinctive cries of pain or joy or imitated calls of animals

Prepositions (connecting words)

Pidgins and creoles and less prepositions
Because of curb

Language bad at handling sptial information and sensation + emotion

Restricted vs/ Elaborated Code

Basil Bernstein – argument about complexity
Restricted code: lower class speech, authoritarian, little context, no explanation of why more what
Elaborated code: Context, more sophisticated vocab, less like inside joke, understood by more people
Take the distinction between the two and try to argue that lower class forms of speech are less complicated
(argument: African American kids are growing up in places with restricted code and this explains their failure in
school)
Bernstein is classist
Labov contradicts this

Spaghetti Junction Theories

Starts as hard and gets simpler
Evidence: the development of verb tenses
Will focus more on ameba theory

Animal Communication
The best evidence shows we evolved from animals
What is the distinction between humans and the natural world? LANGUAGE
What studying animal communication does is it, forces us to fill in the evolutionary picture, and be more precise
about our definition of language
Displacement: with bonobos making escape routes
Distinction between humans and animals: quantitative (not qualitative)
Plot communicative behaviors on a scale between 0-10
Metalanguage: language about language
- In order for us to do what we’re doing, must use metalanguage
Forces us to think about the relationship between production and reception of language
- Animals able of elaborate reception
Primitive grammatical structure

Short essay questions:

Come up with a thesis

Emick approach: what linguistic antropology aspires for

Baby Talk – study children because

- How do we socialize people (create social beings)
- If children are exposed to language, they tend to develop it at the same rate
- 18 months, sign

Theory of Mind: theory about what a person you are talking to is thinking. Hard to operate in the world without
Acquisition vs percevalization

Argue one side but also indicate your knowledge of a contradictory theory

Transformational + Universal grammar: same thing – finite set of rules, infinite set of combinations

Duality of Patterning: animal communication and baby talk

Set of units on one level add up to

3 of 5 short essay
2 of 3 long answer

Would child language be better described as aquisitoon or socialization

Collour: universal vs particularist (Conklin_
To what degree are animal communicative
Is berlin or Conklin correct

Ontoginy recupilulates philogny

Baby Talk:

According to the swiss army knife approach to language (mentioned by attchison), language is just another
puzzle that children encounter. They use thuer all-purpose powerful minds to sort out how it workd. Human
languges are therfore different becayse they are the product of general intelligence, which can solve puzzles in
multiple ways.

Natuer vs. Nurture

Nature lays down the framework and organizes the learning scheme, and nuture fills the details

\Takes five years to get basic knowledge of language and then a futher ten for a very useful vocabulary range

Animals master language much faster than this

Why do languages differ so much?

Flexibility and variation is advantageous in animal communication and rigidity a disadvantage

Thursday 21 March (Week 10, Lecture 2)

Point in film: people make assumption about other people based on how they talk
Prescriptive linguistic: Want people to speak grammatically
- Connected w/ prescriptive view that the way you speak reflects your inner character
Southerners think that Northerners are rude because there are no social braces because they are more direct and
talk to get something done
- Southerners talk with hospitality, and they draw out their speech to talk to each other
o Believe they are friendlier than Northerners (ideology)
Midwesterners believe they have no accent, bland
Social Categories: Social class, gender, race
One way to define language: to carve language up into 4 components – sound (phenology)
- Phenology: The principles that govern sound in language
- Morphology: Study of word shape
- Syntax: Grammar (order)
- Semantics: word meanings
 - (sometimes 5th) Pragmatics: social meaning of speech (how do accomplish certain tasks) – e.g.
apologies (is it genuine or not?
Speech organs:
- Tongue (tip, hump, body)
- Lips
- Soft Pallet
- Lungs
- Throat
- Vocal Chords
What learn when study linguistic organs: human body is capable of making thousands of sounds and human ear
is capable of distinguishing all of them
- Linguistic interested in how a particular language selects a very particular subset of those sounds
Sound systems translate into different writing systems
- Assume writing systems came after sound systems
In some languages, sound and writing systems are and connected because the writing is phonetic
- English is NOT. Many irregular pronunciations.
- Many forms, such and Chinese language, where you need to memorize characters – no connection
between symbol and sound
Two important concepts:
- Minimal Pairs: phonological analysis relies on the fact that certain sounds cause a change in meaning
o If you take one aspect of a sound and change it, is it the same word? Take P from PIG and
change to B and is now BIG – this is a minimal pair (little has changed)
o Take this minimal pair and map it on to other languages
o What sounds count/ matter and which don’t
o 40 consequential sounds in English (phoneme)
o Phoneme: smallest sound unit in language that makes a difference in meaning
o Opposites are things that are identical in every way but one (voice vs. unvoiced)
- Feature/ Distinctive Feature: certain things make a big difference to the meaning of the word
o Nasal Phonemes: can make a big difference to the word
- Phonological rules: how all sound configure together
o Certain sounds work together, and others don’t (won’t find a D and Z together)
International Phonetic Alphabet: would include every possible sound that the human language made
- One letter for each sound
Will use Rickford and Rickford to talk about phonetics
- Oakland School (1996) recognized Ebonics as the primary language of the children they were teaching
– acknowledged that their children spoke a different language at home.
o Racist reaction
o R+R wanted to study racist reaction through phonetics
o AAVE is as ruled and governed as any other language (sound patterns, grammatical
regularities)
o Know some phological ponts in AAVE

Tuesday 26 March (Week 11, Lecture 14)

Linguistics looks at: How is language localized and how is it comparative
Chomsky is a reaction against cultural semantics – focuses on grammar
- Believes by focusing of vocab, we miss the deep structure of language
- Believes others do not get at the underlying theory of language
- believes all languages are the same
- syntax: the way we arrange words to make meaningful sentences
Now: syntax focuses on language
- what exactly a language is isn’t always clear:
o complete expression of a single thought
o addition of a topic + predicate (what is being said about the topic)
difficulties generating a definition of a sentence
- largest structural unit of a piece of language that stands on its own (phonemes: smallest sentences:
largest)
Grammar gets taught to us backwards
 - we use language, and then we pause, and abstract sentences get taken apart and taught grammar, and
then we are taught to use these learnings in everyday life.
Anthropological approach to syntax differs:
- Believes studying any practice means you have to study it in context
- e.g. animal communication
Sentence
- Hierarchical (sub-components)
o Referring expression: noun phrase
o Predicating expression: verb phrase
Coordinate sentence: contains two clauses that can be joined by a conjunction
- “The social worker (NP) should have believed in the poltergeists (VP)”
- Combines two or more sentences in that one cause functions as a grammatical part of another – one
clause is imbedded in another
- The subordinate clause + embedded clause ??
Patterning of sentences has both linear and hierarchical order
- Liner: subject tends to come first and predicate next (English)
- Predicate must consist of both a verb and a noun phase
Word order is important (in English)
- Different languages follow different patterns of word order
o Hoe you understand words depend of context and tone
- English is SVO language: Subject, Verb, Object (main sentence configuration)
o Can have other linear orderings but they do not sound correct
- Over 75% of world languages are SVO (English, French, Vietnamese) or SOV (Japanese, Tibetan)
- 10-15% VSO (Welsh, Tongan)
Chomsky:
“The girl hit the ball”
“The ball was hit by the girl”
o Chomsky: any speaker of English will realize that the underlying point of the sentence are the
same
- Grammar is a finite set of rules for generating an infinite set of possible sentences
- Created school of transformational-generative grammar
- Believes underlying grammatical structure ,maps on to the brain
- People are making creative uses of grammar in day-to-day life
- Transformational generative grammar
AAVE
1. Whenever standard English uses contractions (it’s) AAVE deletes it entirely
2. Deletion of possessive S – deleted when word order makes it redundant
3. Use of habitual to be (AAVE 5 different ways to use word to be)
Semantics: The study of meaning
- Cognitive anthropology: looked up the way language carved up the language in universe in different
ways
o color: some languages divide language in different categories
o kinship system: different terms for family members
o place name: body parts, plant parts
o Cognitive semantics
Different vocabularies for different systems (sport, art, med school – different activities have different
semantics
- Compare different domains as a way to get into domain
- AAVE is mocked for speed of shift of vocab terms
- Rickford +Rickford Just because vocab shifts quickly (+creativity), doesn’t mean there isn’t
standardization (rules)
Nerds tend to seek areodite usage
- Semantic becomes a way to construct identity

Thursday 28 March (Week 11, Lecture 15)

Pragmatics
 - Think of pragmatics as laying on top of all domains in that it is about the social uses of language
- When people are using language in day-to-day situations, they are using it to accomplish certain tasks
- More than just the phonological system
- Looks at the factors that govern our choice of language terms (How you sound, what vocab, and what
grammatical structures will use – what are the effects of this choice?
- As a fluent user of English, capable of using all kinds of expressions, yet we don’t always use these:
pragmatics also looks as what we choose NOT to say
o It is linguistically possible to tell rude jokes at funerals, but we don’t because
 Some are conscious, and some are unconscious
o We are aware of violating pragmatic rules
- Social transgression is imbedded in the structure of the language
- Learn at very young age
o Kids tend to learn pragmatic words first (“please” + “thank you”)
- Easiest way to see pragmatics is through politeness
o Tu + Vous in French
- All languages have pragmatic rules and they can vary drastically
- Somebody can understand you phonologically, your vocabulary, and grammar, although they can mis-
understand pragmatics
- Applied Pragmatics: pragmatic analysis of a speech event and pointing out whether it is successful or
unsuccessful
- Men + women differ
o Men often complain that their independence is being in crotched upon when women thank
them for thing
o Frequently in cross-gender conversation men’s early warning system gets trigged in regard to
hierarchy
o Women’s communicative practices more focused on maintaining relationships
o Men’s communicative practices more focused on hierarchy
- Frames
o You are fluent speaker of a language when you are familiar with different frames
o For a frame to be successful, everyone needs to recognize it
o Easiest way to see what frame is going on is asking the participant what is going on
- Speech Acts
o Language is a kind of action (“I apologize” “I do”)
o Utterances makes something happen – Language is a

Tuesday 2 April (Week 12, Lecture 16) – Performance

Gender vs. Sex: sex biological vs. gender feeling
- We are taught about the difference between men and women as a set of biological differences
- Overemphasizing the biological aspect can lead to too quick endorsement of certain statements
o “men cheat on wives because they are biologically driven to do so”
o “men are better at math because their brains are wired to be good at math”
- Problem: they reduce differences in behavior to biological differences
o Biological differences don’t tell you a whole lot about human behavior
- Across cultures there are differences in how men and women are thought of according to gender
o Think about language as one of the ways different cultures construct ideas about gender in
conversation
- Gender is an emergent social category (it happens) that we can see in conversation, that we make in
conversation
- Language is a powerful tool to see how different cultures handle gender and sex
- Kuiper’s in Indonesia, men and women have symmetrical social roles but asymmetrical linguistic roles
because of their kinship system
- Universalized symmetry between male vs. female speech
o Could it be that males have to make a fundamental shift as they switch from boys to men
because their caregivers are women and they have to learn a new set of linguistic practices
o Is it that men and women are brought up in different ways
Language is used to describe some state to external affairs or internal affairs
 - In both cases, the common assumption is that language comes after the existence of the things we are
describing and that language places a label on these things
- Language is put to work by all of us, all the time, to create social reality
- John Austin: distinguished between constatives and performatives
o Constatives: descriptive statements, words that describe a situation, can say they are true or
false
o Performatives: words that indicate action
 Saw that language is not only used to describes states of affairs but is also used to
DO/ PERFORM things (social action)
Performance – Speech Acts
- Performance in this sense has nothing to do with arts
o This notion is inadequate because it suggests that performance is separate from daily life, and
is only, in some sense, “artistic.” In fact, “performance” is present to some degree in many
aspects of daily life.
- Idea of performance that allows us to think about how it plays out in all of our daily actions, present to
some degree in all aspects of social life
- Chomsky believed that language was messy and ungrammatical (performance), and believed we
shouldn’t study language for this reason – competence + performance: wanted to get to underlying
structure (competence) but leave behind performance – NOT the performace we are focusing on
Austin:
- Locutionary act: the act of making a meaningful utterance, a stretch of spoken language that is preceded
by silence and followed by silence or a change of speaker—also known as a locution or an
utterance act.
- Illocutionary force: the speaker's intention in producing that utterance, culturally-defined, e.g.
promising, advising, warning (may map onto the perlocutionary outcome)
- Perlocutionary act: an action or state of mind brought about by, or as a consequence of, saying
something
o Perlocutionary outcome: what is the outcome/effect of this act on the listener, e.g. person feels
apologized to
o Some people have tried to make a definitive list of speech acts, but is only pertinent in
European context (SAE contexts- (Standard Average European)
o When you try to apple these speech act theories in other texts, start to find that doesn’t apply
well, Austinian application
- Kinds of speech acts that Austin has in mind are very much speech acts that rely on Western culture,
e.g. “I now pronounce you man and wife”, “I sentence you to execution” – “the law”, not simply for
social good
o Rely on big institutions that don’t exist in all societies
o In some societies, the speech act is not just about the intention of the individual and their
illocutionary force – speech acts may be more of a social affair
o Illongot (Philippines): bold directives, focused on getting someone to do something, but they
do not have institutions to back these bold directives, so when you take away these institutions,
things look different
 Collective emphasis on language – collective action, less individual action
 They give bold directions out not because they have individual intentions, but because
they want to teach people what their direct roles and social positions are, and the
abilities associated with these roles – teach children what their social roles are
 Socializing people to the group
(1) Performance is a situation in which the WAY something is being said is important
- (2) The ways it is being put forward can then be evaluated by an audience, e.g. is it good or bad
- Every instance of performance has these two components
- Every performance has a ‘one-off’ nature to them, they can never truly be repeated
- At the very same time as you have the sense of listening to someone, as this distinct thing that’ll never
happen again, there’s also a sense that you could be pulling what you’re listening to out of context
(ENtextualization), e.g. you compare this lecture to other lectures you have heard before and weigh it
up
o CONtextualization: everything that is said is tied to the here-and-now
o ENtextualization: removing things out of their context
 DEcontextualization: pull something out of context
  REcontextualization: to take something out of context and put it in another context,
e.g. quoting

Thursday 4 April (Week 12, Lecture 17) – Identity I

Recap
- Pragmatics: social uses of language
- all things in addition to vocab and grammar so that you may use vocab and grammar properly, e.g. how
to say bye to people on phone – often easiest to see in degrees of politeness
- Effects of language on listeners and speakers
- People take language in terms of identity very seriously
- You must be immersed in a language and actually speak a language in order to truly understand the
pragmatics of a language
Pragmatics leads to identity
- Language tightly bound with social life
- Language is an important factor in how we identify ourselves and how others identify us
o Southerners think they are more sociable and gracious because of the way that they speak, e.g.
leaving longer pauses, asking how others day was, praise, socialize for the sake of socialize
o Northerners think that slowness are the result of stupidity and lack of education. Southerners
shoot back and try say that northerners are just rude because they shift topics quickly, interrupt
- Age, gender, ethnicity, nationality can all be indicated by personality
21 Accents
- What is she doing as she is changing accents?
o Scottish: she describes the last name “Walker” and where it comes from instead of simply
stating their name and where they are from.
o 2nd Australian accent: Very patriotic
o South Carolina: slows down speech
o Brooklyn: gets angry about something
- Tendency to think about the relationship between language and identity in terms of geography
- The degree of specificity in terms of language and identity is stipulated by your location
o In Australia, you would notice different kinds of Australian accents, but anywhere else in the
world it would all just be an Australian accent
Language and Dialect
- Language can convey geographic identity BUT
o Even though somebody speaking Swedish is certainly from Sweden, but French language
could be used in 50 or so countries
- Dialect can be more informative, but still an argued term
o Dialect is not rural speech as opposed to urban speech
o Not a subset of speech or an improper speech
o NOT, lesser known languages (“primitive dialects”)
o All languages are in a sense dialect
- No dialect is considered superior to others
- Dialects become a problem when you are trying to classify a language
o Seems easy, just see if people understand each other (mutual intelligibility test)
 Problem: in England there are regional dialects that are extremely hard for other
people to understand each other (different dialects of same language)
- Dialect continuum:  a spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that
neighboring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely
separated varieties are not mutually intelligible.
o Chain of dialects, at any point in chain, speakers on either side can understand each other fine,
but when move further down change, problems
o E.g. French in one country is not the same as French in another country
- A dialect is a language variety in which the use of grammar, vocab, phenology etc. identify the social
background of a speaker
o NOT accent: just a different way of pronouncing vocab, but same vocab is used
Ethnic Identity: Allegiance to a group which one has ancestral link
- Identity is a general notion and does not only apply to those that practice cultures
 - Once a group becomes aware of their identity, they become very fixed on preserving this identity, and
this often leads to wanting statehood (e.g. French Canada)
o Illegal to have a sign in English in Quebec
- Why is language such an important factor in ethnic movements
o Language is an obvious and widespread feature of community life
o To choose on language over another marks your affiliation
o Provides a distinct like to past and history
o Differences in language can create a barrier between people
- Rickford and Rickford was to trace lineage of AAVE
o All users need to decide how much standard vs. how much spoken they should use
 Too much standard in one context, may be thought to be pretentious
 Too much spoken soul, thought to be vulgar

Tuesday 9 April (Week 13, Lecture 18) – Mediation

Speech acts
- Sometimes Illocutionary act maps on to perlocutionary force BUT there is frequently a disjuncture
between the two (e.g. apologize – does the person feel apologized to?)
Language does a lot more than just map onto society
- Race, gender, social class – we choose how these will be portrayed, they don’t just exist
We need to think of language use in a large audience context
Media: is conduit (channel), something that is passed through
- Medium: a person which spiritual messages passes through
o Developed during creation of radio
- News Media / Mass Media: a group of institutions or actors that are responsible for broadcasting,
publishing, or television
o Mediation of information to people
Language in mediated context has tremendous reach, therefore it is important to study and keep in mind
- Otherwise will be unable to understand the relationship between language and society
- Mediation + language has not been studied really well
o Very hard to do, but two ways to do it are:
 1. Production – watch the broadcasting or study the actual media
 2. Reception – problem! Doesn’t say who’s receiving the media, whether they are
paying attention
 Empirical way: watch the media w/ the subject and ask them how they are
receiving the media
o The reason so hard to study is because we must do both things at the same time
 w/ speech acts aswell, in order to study if a speech act is successful, must look at both
speaker and audience
Different media works in different ways, work w/ language in different ways, and work with our senses in
different ways
- Temptation to think that more sensory input is better
o Different kinds of media are suited to different kinds of moments
- Twitter, FB, Instagram, all have different ways of delivering media
When new form of media emerges, must find a way to use it
- Late 40’s + Early 50’s figured this out
o Man started out broadcasting on radio where broadcasted on rooves of England during war
o Asked to create a TV show, but didn’t like the concept because though visual would be a
distraction
McCarthyism
- Unravels in 51+52 through media
- Video Clip (Good Night and Good Luck)
Media and Language communities
- A group that is familiar with a particular group of mediated texts
Inscript: transcript that you
- J+S If you think that texted language aren’t complex, think again
Tuesday 23 April (Week 15, Lecture 22) – Music

Two ways of thinking about language:

1. Think about language as its own communicative domain and not much else we do is much like it
2. All communicative behavior behaves at least a little bit like language

Music carries social force, accomplishes tasks in the same way language does
Way to see this is to break the pragmatics of music, e.g. Borat, racist
Lyrics are only half the story of a music
- Lyrics without a musical setting don’t stand
Life imitates art hypothesis
- The reason why there is EXPLICIT warning on songs
Art imitates life
- Music arises from a particular social setting
Genre (big frame)
Brazilians were ashamed of Brazilian country music
Country music is most popular in Brazil
Coutnry music became popular when they became urbanized
- using country stick to beat urban preset
o people wanted the “good old days”
- Traditional country music (Música caipira)
o Small present of music sold 2-4%
o Only performed by brothers but harmonize
o Sung in a ‘hick’ accents
- Musica Sertanja
o 20% of market share (include
o Largely also performed by brother but not necessarily singing with each other throughout the
entire piece)
o Electric instrumentation guitars, drums
o People embarrassed by this
- People embarrassed because of cultural intimacy
- (American) Cultural emperialism
o We are dominated by American popular culture
o ‘Achy Breaky Heart’
o Looks as if it is cultural emperialism but isn’t because the luyrics are adjeusted to the genre
 About a breakup
 In the genre of portugese country music, original English lyrics would not work in
context
 Breakups songs in portugese are SAD

- Race, gender and social class are created in interaction

- Kaipers
o Ritual speacialists now how to form couplets together
 Almost always something went wrong in regards to paying tribute to ancestors
o Women provide emotional impetus
- Hall
o What is meant by domination? If you look around world, almost always male speech forms are
given a higher position than women (more value)
 Female speech in some ways index social position
 Does language index rank?
  Women indicate that they are listening
 Sex phone workers use dominating speech to in fact control the situation
(because they get paid)
- Dialect is a problematic term (often used to demean people)
o Probably means that it is being held to a standard
o Difference between dialect and accent is about sound (accent is pronounciation)
- Language has a dialect that has an army and a navy
- Boundaries around language are shaped by politics
- IPA (international phonetic alphabet)
- Phonemes (smallest sound units), phenology: studies how language selects a small subset of sounds to
create meaning
o Part of the classic definition of language
- 6 CPP Qs, SIGNIFICANCE (why does it matter in relation to the course, who cares) – only do 5 (post
midterm)
- GIVE 3 DO 2 short essay Qs (take a position on something, signal that you have understood the
opposing argument)
- 1 long essay Qs (take a position on something) – 5 paragraphs
- Speech Acts
o Propositions/ constatives making statements – factual statements
 Those statements are not that comments
 Carrying out an action through language – rarely making factual statements – these
are performatives
o Locutionary act is the words themselves
o Illocutionary act is the intention behind the speech act
o Perlocutionary outcome is what happens as a result of that
 Illocutionary act doesn’t always map on to the Perlocutionary outcome
- Performance is when (1) you pay attention to the message and its structure, (2) orientated towards an
audience, (3) the audience gets to evaluate the quality of what’s taking place (4) something changes as a
result of that interaction
- CONtextualization is about the here and now (the unrepeatability of this moment)
- ENtextualization is the sense that you could compare this moment to other monets (generalizable
things)
o Decontextualization
o Recontextualization
- Social categories
- Mediation: is when something is channeled
o mediation allows us to understand certain language communities
o large percentage of our day to day language use is mediated (significance)
- Authority vs. authoritarianism
o Authority: demonstration – points towards an institution
 Authoritative: encourages a debate
o Authoritarianism: does not seek to demonstrate outside of the speaker (what Weber calls
charismatic authority)
 Monologic (single voiced)
 Seeks to limit interpretive range
- Why look @ music
o Way for us to see mediation
o Is a Genre, is a big frame (more particu[ant, interations and last longer)
- Does all human expression act as language