DOMAINS OF

ANTHROPOLOGICAL
LINGUISTICS
Three language phenomena
Running is pronounced as [ˈrʌnɪŋ] or [ˈrʌnɪn]
[ˈrʌnɪŋ] [ˈrʌnɪn]

Female Male
Middle to upper class Working/ lower class

How if middle class pronounced [ˈrʌnɪn] ?

The anthropological Linguistic research results:

“To enhance masculinity”
Three language phenomena
In Papua New Guinea,

Yimas vernacular Tok Pisin

older Younger
Female Male

When adults speak Yimas and Tok Pisin, What is the meaning of choices?

Anthropological linguistic explanantion:

 Speaking Tok Pisin shows modernism

 Speaking Yimas vernacular to construct cultural identity, to conduct cultural
practice, to show its unique
 Three language phenomena
The phenomenon of Silence in the Cibecue Apache
1. A couple during early stage of courtship
2. Meeting a stranger
3. Return of individual who has been away for a long time
4. Being insulted or abused verbally
What is the meaning of silence for people of Cibecue Apache?
Anthropological linguistic explanation:

Sign for “potentially dangerous” (when the central participant in

social situation is UNKNOWN or UNPREDICTABLE
FROM THE ABOVE PHENOMENA:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
FOCUSES ON SOCIAL MEANINGS
BEHIND THE SOCIAL PHENOMENA
OF LANGUAGE PRACTICE
MEANING
• Those clouds mean rain
• Red means “stop!”
• What does “thespian” mean?
• I didn’t mean what I said
• I didn’t mean to say it; it just slipped out

Meaning: ‘intend’, ‘signify’, ‘referent’

Cultural vs. Non-Cultural Act
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Nervous twitch?
Or
Conspiratorial wink?

Which one is a cultural act?

Meanings as Representation

Physical forms of signs  How can we relate subjective

(external, social, public) experience to objective sign?
 How can we derive
conventional meaning from
private one?
 How can we know the public
Process of making meaning objective sign is assigned
similarly by two individual
minds?
Mental representation
(subjective/individual
experience about ‘world’
constructed in someone’s
mind)
HABITUS
• All knowledge is action in given context (embodied action)
• Individual human being has capability in contructing phenomena
socially or culturally
• Individual is completed with habitus ( a set of dispositions which
incline agents to act and react in certain ways: practice, perception,
attitude, occurring or deriving historically through learning and
nurturing)
SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE
• Articulate knowledge is knowledge derived from explicit rules, explicitly
stated and critically reflected on
(eg. Knowledge of street names)
• Tacit Knowledge: Knowledge gained from personal experience that is
more difficult to express.
(eg, knowledge how to drive a car)
 Focal awareness is explicit awareness of action (hammer hits the nail)
 Subsidiary awareness : tacit/perception awareness (the vibration of
handle hammer on one’s hand)
See slide 7
• Wink is cultural practice because it occurs in the context of recurrent
successful social coupling, a practice inculcated in habitus

• Twitch is not cultural practice because it does not meet the

requirement
Meaning in Cultural Practice
• Making meaning is a communicative interaction by action and its
supplement through relationship of structural coupling.
• In Cultural Practice, making meaning is generated through
innumerable previous structural coupling over many generation.
• Cultural meanings are not in individual minds, but rather they are
shared by social actors.
• Cultural meanings are public meaning encoded in shared symbols
Culture as Cognition
• Culture definition according to Goodenough (1964)
Cultural Practice and Linguistic Practice
• CPs are meaningful practice through which humans in relationship
sustain on going histories of social structural coupling
• One of the CPs is Linguistic Practice
• LP is any communicative practice which promotes coordination
between beings in ongoing social structural coupling through the
meaning bearing capacity of language signs.
• LP coordinate our behaviour through linguistic sign
Nature of Linguistic Sign
• All Linguistic signs consist of Form and meaning
• The Signs can be categorized into ICON, INDEX, SYMBOL
• ICON is a sign which there is perceptible likeness in its form and
meaning (onomatope)
• INDEX is a sign whose meaning is interpreted from the context in
which it is uttered (choosing idiolect is index of his/her region)
• SYMBOL is a sign in which a relationship between its form and
meaning is strictly conventional