Linguistic anthropology definition9/19/2023 ![]() Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that baby talk is not universal, that the direction of adaptation (whether the child is made to adapt to the ongoing situation of speech around it or vice versa) was variable that correlated, for example, with the direction it was held vis-a-vis a caregiver's body. They discovered that the processes of enculturation and socialization do not occur apart from the process of language acquisition, but that children acquire language and culture together in what amounts to an integrated process. Linguistic anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, in a remarkable series of studies addressed the important anthropological topic of socialization (the process by which infants, children, and foreigners become members of a community, learning to participate in its culture), using linguistic as well as ethnographic methods. The travesti community, the argument goes, ends up at least making a powerful attempt to transcend the shame the larger Brazilian public might try to foist off on them-again, through loud public discourse and other modes of performance. In later work, Kulick demonstrates that certain loud speech performances called *um escândalo*, Brazilian travesti (roughly, 'transvestite') prostitutes shame clients. To speak Tok Pisin is to index a Modern, Christian ( Catholic) identity, based not on *hed* but on *save*, that is an identity linked with the will and the skill to cooperate. To speak Taiap is associated with one identity - not only local but "Backward" and also an identity based on the display of *hed* (personal autonomy). (Linguistic anthropologists use "indexical" to mean indicative, though some indexical signs create their indexical meanings on the fly, so to speak. Kulick explored how the use of two languages with and around children in Gapun village - the traditional language ( Taiap) not spoken anywhere but in their own village and thus primordially "indexical" of Gapuner identity, and Tok Pisin (the widely circulating official language of New Guinea). Linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick has done this in relation to identity, for example, in a series of settings, first in a village called Gapun in Papua New Guinea. ![]() So, for example, they investigate questions of sociocultural identity linguistically. In the current paradigm, which has emerged since the late 1980s, instead of continuing to pursue agendas that come from a discipline alien to anthropology, linguistic anthropologists have systematically addressed themselves to problems posed by the larger discipline of anthropology - but using linguistic data and methods. However, Hymes' ambition in a sense backfired the second paradigm in fact marked a further distancing of the subdiscipline from the rest of anthropology. The name certainly stresses that the primary identity is with anthropology, whereas anthropological linguistics conveys a sense that the primary identity of *its* practitioners was with linguistics, which is a separate academic discipline on most universities campuses today (not in the days of Boas and Sapir). Hymes had hoped to link linguistic anthropology more closely with the mother discipline. ![]() ![]() Whereas the first paradigm focused on ostensibly distinct "languages" (scare quotes indicate that contemporary linguistic anthropologists treat the concept of "a language" as an ideal construction covering up complexities within and "across" so-called linguistic boundaries), the unit of analysis in the second paradigm was new - the " speech event." (The speech event is an event defined by the speech occurring in it - a lecture, for example - so that a dinner is not a speech event, but a speech situation, a situation in which speech may or may not occur.) Hymes also introduced a new unit of analysis. It would involve taking advantage of new developments in technology, including new forms of mechanical recording. The first paradigm, known as " linguistics" (later, " anthropological linguistics"), was devoted to themes unique to the subdiscipline-linguistic documentation of languages then seen as doomed to extinction (these were the languages of native North America on which the first members of the subdiscipline focused), grammatical description, typological classification, and the problem/question of linguistic relativity (associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf but actually developed by Franz Boas and, before him, by a long line of European thinkers from Vico to Herder to Humboldt).ĭell Hymes was largely responsible for launching the second paradigm that fixed the name "linguistic anthropology" in the 1960s, though he also coined the term " ethnography of speaking" (or " ethnography of communication") to describe the agenda he envisioned for the field. As Duranti has noted (and the next paragraphs summarize his article), three paradigms have emerged over the history of the subdiscipline.
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