ANTH 3/LING 3
(SPRING 2006)
EXERCISES AND
For Friday, 1/20. Read Saville-Troike, ("Language and Culture" to end, 27-40).
These sections will give you a compressed overview of the topics we will be covering in greater depth this semester. This include the issues of whether the language we use shapes the way we think (p. 28, 31, 34, 38), cross-cultural differences in what are considered appropriate ways of speaking (p.29), and ideologies regarding the relation of language to power and status (p. 31-33).
p. 29 “speech act theory” Speech act theory looks at what effect is action intended by an utterance. So in the example given, “It’s getting noisy in here” is meant as a command or request (for example, on the part of a grade school teacher to the students) to be quiet.
p. 35
Bernstein on “positional and personal family structures,” “strong
boundary maintenance and weak boundary maintenance” and “restricted code,"
"elaborated code." The British sociolinguist, Basil Bernstein,
described two speech patterns in
p. 36 "performative in nature" This is a term from speech act theory referring to utterances the saying of which performs the action described. For example, if you say, "I bet you five dollars the Raiders will win," you have thereby made that bet. We will talk about performatives later in the semester.
p. 37 "paralinguistic features of production" Aspects of the sound of a person's utterance that go beyond the language system, such as voice quality (e.g., breathy, silky, menacing). Some linguists define paralinguistics to includes the prosodic aspects of speech: intonation, volume, speed, and rhythm; others distinguish between these.
p. 38 Chomsky = Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. He argued that at a deep level, all languages shared similar constraints on their grammars. His linguistics was very different from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, because he was interested in abstract rules, not the way language use varies depending on the context.
p. 38 conversational maxims, Grice. The philosopher Paul Grice argued that conversation presupposes certain shared rules, or maxims, such as "Be truthful." Even when these maxims are violated, the expectation that they are in effect guides the hearer's interpretation of what the speaker meant.
Assignment (if you submit reading comments)
What parts struck you in particular (because you found them insightful, wrong, interesting, confusing, or for any other reason).
ANTH3/LING3, Spring 2006
For Monday, 1/23.
In this reading really focus on pp. 14 (Speech community)-top of 23 and the section (pp. 210-213) on taboos and euphemisms. I added the section on taboos and euphemisms so you’ll have an example of a speech norm that might differentiate one speech community from another. The first part of the chapter has useful information, too on communicative functions, which we will come back to later. But don't get bogged down in it (and technical terms like "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary") now.
p. 10 The Hymes that Saville-Troike keeps referring to is Dell Hymes, who formulated the approach in linguistic anthropology that is called the ethnography of communication.
p. 11. "An unmarked greeting sequence such as 'Hello, how are you today? Fine, how are you?' has virtually no referential content" is another example of Saville-Troike's claim, "the most important characteristic of routines and rituals is that truth value is largely irrelevant." The referential content of a statement is what it says about the world (the content of the words) as compared to its pragmatic function, which is the intended or actual effect of saying it. The referential content of "Nice day, isn't it?" is the claim that the weather is good today. The pragmatic function of that statement could be to show friendliness.
p. 11 "unmarked greeting …marked communicative behavior…as long as it is unmarked" What is unmarked "is more neutral, more normal, or more expected" (Saville-Troike p. 60). We'll discuss this later in the semester.
p. 12 “Enclitics” are words that "normally lack their own accent and attach themselves in pronunciation to the preceding word to form a single word unit." (http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~ancgreek/accenthtml/enclitics1.html)
For Monday there is an Exercise instead of a
Describe two speech communities to which you belong. Are those speech communities "hard-shelled" or "soft-shelled"? (See Saville-Troike's definitions of those terms, p. 16.) What is some of the communicative competence they share that wouldn’t be shared by people who speak the same language but are members of a different speech community?
ANTH 3/LING3 (Spring 06)
For Wed., 1/25.
Here Saville-Troike introduces different language varieties. Pay particular attention to the concepts of marked/unmarked (p. 60), and of Labov’s distinctions among indicators, markers, and stereotypes (p. 61). One definition she should give you is for dialect, which is “The patterns of pronunciation, lexicon (i.e., vocabulary), and morphological and syntactic structures typical of a particular region or social group.” Sociolinguists typically distinguish between varieties associated with a setting (register), and varieties associated with a category of speakers (dialect). As you read about the different language varieties, think about whether that is a useful distinction.
p. 59
the
p. 70 morphosyntax This is what is usually called "grammar," e.g., acceptable sentence structures in a language or dialect and ways of indicating number, tense, negation, subject-verb agreement, etc.
p. 72 covert prestige This is the value in a social subgroup accorded to use of language varieties that are nonstandard (less prestigious) in the larger society.
p. 73 hypercorrection Overextending the application of rules from more prestigious speech varieties, thereby making mistakes (from the perspective of the more prestigious variety). For example, "Between you and I…" (which is an incorrect application of the "rule" that "I" is often considered correct when the speaker might otherwise be inclined to say "me").
p. 73 performative (See discussion of performatives on handout for 1/21.) The idea of a performative being “felicitous” we’ll discuss later. Basically, performatives can’t be true or false; instead, they make something happen or not if spoken by the right person under the right circumstances (e.g., only a baseball umpire can make someone be out by saying “You’re out.”) That’s when it’s felicitous.
Don't miss the interesting discussion of "lavender linguistics" on p. 81 and non-native varieties on pp. 86-87.
Exercise
Bring to class a short example of real speech or writing. For the exercise you turn in, indicate what aspects of the situation, speaker, and audience affected the variety chosen. What can you say about the register and dialect used? In class, we'll try to guess those features just from hearing the example.
For Friday, 1/27,
This reading describes how to analyze communicative events and determine their boundaries.
p. 117 "In considering silence, a basic distinction must be made between silences which carry meaning, but not propositional content, and silent communicative acts which are entirely dependent on adjacent vocalizations for interpretation, and which carry their own illocutionary force." This is a very confusing way of saying that there are two kinds of silence: one that isn't meant as a deliberate statement (although the conversational partner might read something into it) and one that is meant as a deliberate statement and the conversational partner definitely ought to read something into it. An example of the first kind is a pause because you can't think of what to say next; an example of the second kind is the way teachers sometimes pause to let the class fill in the blank (see bottom of p. 117). Propositional content is the same as referential content: It's the message conveyed by the words, and is true or false. Illocutionary force is the same as pragmatic force.
p. 119 "…Whorf's ghost stalks the pages of field notes and tape transcripts which omit potentially meaningful occurrences of silence." We will be reading the work of the famous linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf later in the semester. He argued that the lexicon (vocabulary) and morphosyntax (grammar) of a language shape the way speakers of that language habitually think. The point of this sentence is that as linguists we pay too much attention to what people say and not enough to their silences.
No exercise. Please turn in reading comments, if this is one of your 22 comments/exercises.
For Monday, 1/30 Kim
and Markus, “Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Silence: An Analysis of Talking
as a Cultural Practice” (website) This is the first assigned reading
from our website. Go to bernard.pitzer.edu/~cstrauss/linganth/, click on
This reading presents an analysis of rules for interaction and cultural norms of interpretation for talking in college classrooms, and other contexts. The focus is on differences between dominant U.S. American and East Asian norms for speaking in such contexts. Since all of you have experience in classrooms, I will be particularly interested in your reactions to the article. Do you think the description is accurate? Please feel free to criticize if you think it overgeneralizes.
No exercise. Please turn in reading comments if this is one of your 22.
For Wed, 2/1 Maltz and Borker, “A
cultural approach to male-female miscommunication” website and Kulik, “Anger, gender, language shift, and the politics of
revelation in a Papua New Guinean village” website. I will
send you the pdf files for the readings, in case they
do not appear on the website in time. On
the website, if a reading doesn’t appear when you click on the link, you can
refresh the browser with F5. As you may have noticed,
the Kulik article about the Gapun
of New Guinea is missing a line from the bottom of every page! Given
these problems, it's ok if you just focus on pp. 92
(Starting with the section "Proclaiming Anger in a Kros")--98
(up to the section "Language Shift"). Read to end of this for the missing lines.
These articles go
into the way sex (biological) and gender (cultural) affect rules for
interaction and norms of interpretation.
As the Kulik article, especially, makes clear,
norms of interpretation regarding who should speak in what way in a given
communicative event or across many types of communicative events are related to
whole “language ideologies” (theories about language) in a given society and
even broader ideas about religion, emotion, human nature, and the meaning of
life. I’d like you to include some
discussion of these broader cultural understandings in your first paper. The Maltz and Borker article gives you a picture of
p. 85 Minimal responses
are also called backchannels
Here are the missing lines from the bottom of the key pages in Kulik:
p. 92: house littered the ground with coffee beans, which they shot at each other and at
p. 93: The collective actions of men were considered the 'bones' of society. The actions of women, even though these were sometimes collec-
p. 94: Some task that requires a number of laborers, such as carrying house posts, roofing
p. 95: by all village men, called to effect a cure for the author of this paper, who in June
p. 96: KEM We're making it.
p. 97: in one's stomach (indeed, the public exposure of anger is the whole purpose of the
I apologize for the nuisance, especially for any of you who've already tried to read it! I will have a fresh copy scanned but it may not be ready for class
No exercise. Please turn in reading comments if this is one of your 22.
ANTH 3. Spring 05. For 2/3 (Chs. 1&2), 2/6 (
Basso, Portraits of
"the Whiteman"
For the next three classes we’ll read about the miscommunication that results from cross-cultural differences between Anglos and Apache in rules for interaction and norms of interpretation. This book focuses on a particular speech genre, Apache jokes about “Whitemen.” The reading also raises interesting issues about when joking is appropriate.
(p.8) code-switching: We will study code-switching in detail later in the semester. This refers to the phenomenon of a speaker switching between different languages or language varieties.
(p. 8) illocutionary properties: These are a subset of pragmatic properties. What speech act does the speaker hope to accomplish with this utterance: asserting, committing to do something, trying to get someone else to do something, etc.?
(p. 9) “They are context bound messages that refer indexically…” We will discuss indexicality in the next unit. The basic idea is that indexicals take their meaning from the context. Usually this is because they are associated in experience with a particular aspect of the context, such as the age of the speaker, or the setting.
(p. 26) Consanguineal kinship = related by blood (con = with; sanguis = blood)
(p. 27) Matrilineal clans = clan membership determined by mother's clan; men and women belong to their mother's clan
(p. 27) Exogamous clans = people marry outside of their clans
(p. 32) Matrilateral cross-cousin = Mother's brother's child (cross cousins have parents who are siblings of the opposite sex)
(p. 55) suprasegmental phenomena = aspects of pronunciation that apply not just to the pronunciation of one phonological segment (roughly, one letter)-e.g., prosodic & paralinguistic features of tempo, tone, voice quality
(p.37) paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type = The liar paradox is an example (e.g., the Cretan who says, "All Cretans are liars"-should you believe him or not?). This is not very helpful for describing jokes!
(p. 43) Those of you who have studied kinship: Why should people joke about maternal uncles in a society with matrilineal clans? (Think about the comparison with jokes about the Whiteman.)
No exercise. Just send me reading comments.
For Wednesday, 2/15,
We are beginning a new unit that looks in detail at some of the social functions of speech. Many of the authors we will be reading are not anthropologists, and they will suggest what could be universal features of speech use.
The reading for Wednesday is a very famous work by a philosopher, John L. Austin. In it he describes performatives and proposes what is now known as speech act theory. He was motivated by a philosophical puzzle: There seem to be some statements that look like a simple descriptive (or in his terms, constative) statement, but you can’t say whether they are true or false. These statements are ones where, just by saying them, you are performing the action described (e.g., “I bet you…,” “I promise you…”).
p. 17 “the algebra of marriage is Boolean” Boolean is a system of logic. One meaning of Boolean is “true or false.” So I believe he means that you are either married or not. (He seems to be talking about the marriage systems with which he is familiar; in many parts of the world there is polygyny.)
p. 22 “etiolations” Acts of weakening by stunting the growth or development of something
No exercise.
For Friday, 2/17 Brown and Gilman, “The pronouns of power
and solidarity” (website)
This is a famous discussion of the way power and solidarity or intimacy affect pronoun choice in languages that have a formal and informal second-person pronoun (e.g., “tu” vs. “usted” in Spanish). There are different patterns of usage (how to determine when to use which pronoun) for each language at different points in its history. The shift in English to the previously formal “you” that was mentioned in the Kulik reading is explained more thoroughly here.
For your second paper you might want to replicate Brown and Gilman’s study for contemporary speakers of a language that has formal and informal second-person pronouns or other grammatical forms. You can also apply their analysis to other forms of address, such as, in English, the choice between addressing someone by their first name or last name and title.
Two particularly interesting aspects of the reading are their arguments that solidarity is more important than power in determining whether to use formal and informal pronouns, and the way speakers’ politics affects the pronouns they use.
When you are reading this, keep in mind that it was first published in 1960!
No exercise.
For Monday, 2/20 “Dude,”
by Scott Kiesling (website)
This recently published article looks at a different term of address: “Dude.” Kiesling’s careful observations show how ordinary aspects of speech, such as used of the term “dude,” can be socially revealing.
p. 282 first- and second-order indexical meanings: When you hear “indexical” think “pointing to,” as an index finger points to an object. According to the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, first-order indexical meanings are direct correlations that are assumed to hold between some feature of speech and some feature of the speaker (e.g., saying “dude” is typical of young men). Second-order indexical meanings are speakers’ ideas about the meaning of what they say (e.g., young men’s explicit or implicit schemas that lead them to use “dude”).
p. 282 fronted /u/ : Fronted vowels are pronounced farther toward the front of the oral cavity.
p. 286, 288 Notice that when Kiesling uses “intimacy,” he means physical intimacy, not emotional closeness.
p. 291 Discourse structure marker: Indicating the end of a unit of discourse/beginning of another, e.g., the end of one part of a story, or the end of a clause.
p. 292 We’ll discuss Brown and Levinson’s theory in the next class.
p. 295 chiasmus: A rhetorical structure in which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other. (The example was on p. 294, where Pete says, “Dave dude, dude Dave.”)
ANTH 3 (Spring 2006)
This is the summary of what is now a famous theory. You will see that Brown and Levinson develop Brown and Gilman's analysis of pronouns, using the same dimensions of power and solidarity (which they call social distance), but apply it more widely than to pronoun use and terms of address. (BTW, the Brown is not the same: It's Roger Brown for the 1960 pronoun paper and Penelope Brown for the 1978 book, Politeness, from which this excerpt was taken.) Basically, they take the concept of “face,” which we read about in Saville-Troike, asking how people perform fact threatening acts, depending on how close they are to the hearer, whether there is a power difference between them, and how serious a face-threat the act would be. Unlike Brown and Gilman, who discuss the historically and culturally contingent nature of pronoun usage, Brown and Levinson stress cross-cultural universals and even hint at cross-species universals.
For your second paper, you could study examples of face threatening acts, and see whether the speech used fits their predictions.
p. 59 Durkheimian social facts = facts about socially determined behavior
p. 62 zweckrational vs. wertwational models of individual action = terms from the great sociologist, Max Weber. Zweckrational = rational when seen as a means to an end; wertwational = an end in itself
p. 63 extensionally or intensionally defined = the extension of a term is all the items it applies to; the intension of a term is its meaning
p. 76, 77 emic, emically = based on culturally recognized values and perceptions (see lecture of 1/27.
Exercise
Think of some potentially Face Threatening Act (FTA). Give examples of how you would perform it using each of the following strategies: (1) baldly without redress, (2) positive politeness, (3) negative politeness, or (4) off record. Under what circumstances would you use each? Do your examples fit Brown and Levinson's formula: W= D+P+R?
Remember: Negative politeness is not rudeness! It is super politeness, geared to satisfying "negative face."
For Fri., 2/24 Excerpt from
This reading introduces conversation analysis. Conversation analysts discuss the way conversations are patterned. Knowledge of these patterns can be used for practical advantage. These patterns are supposed to be cross-cultural universals. Do you agree?
*Suggestion for Paper #2: Analyze a conversation (either a live one that you tape record, or one taken from a movie or tv show). Use the tools of politeness analysis or conversation analysis to show how the participants in the conversation acknowledge and/or try to change their relations of power, solidarity, or intimacy.
No exercise.
For Monday, 3/1.
The last part of this unit will be devoted to bilingual speech communities, and what is communicated by a speaker’s choice of language (“code”) in such communities. This reading from Saville-Troike is fairly straightforward.
REVISED SYLLABUS
|
Wed3/1 |
Example: Puerto Ricans in Zentella, Growing Up
Bilingual, Chs. 1-2 |
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Fri 3/3 |
Zentella, Growing Up
Bilingual, Chs. 3-4 |
|
Mon3/6 |
Zentella, Growing Up
Bilingual, Chs. 5 & 10 |
|
Wed3/8 |
Grice’s Conversational maxims and implicature
Grice, “Logic and
conversation” |
|
Fri 3/10 |
PAPER #2 DUE Oral reports |
|
|
SPRING BREAK |
|
|
III. THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE USE |
|
Mon3/20 |
Example: Code switching in Joseph, excerpt from Language and Identity website |
Zentella’s book, Growing up Bilingual, has become a much-cited work on code choices of bilingual
(Spanish / English) Puerto Ricans in
In the Saville-Troike
reading, pay special attention to the terms “convergence” and “divergence.”
I decided to move the Joseph article to the third unit because it relates to larger issues of social attitudes toward language varieties, which we will study in that unit, more than individuals’ choices in a particular speech context, which is our focus in the current unit.
No exercise.
For Wed., 3/8 Grice, “Logic and conversation” (website). Start on p. 151, second
column, third paragraph (“The following may provide a first
approximation…”)
H. P. Grice is a philosopher of language, like Austin (who wrote the excerpt we read on performatives and speech acts). The transition from Zentella’s ethnography to philosophy will probably be somewhat jarring. I’m assigning it now because it is a classic, important piece, but you don’t need it for your second paper. I wanted you to do the readings that were directly relevant to the second paper before you got to this one.
Grice’s basic point is that in conversation we have certain expectations. We expect speakers to say as much as is required, to be truthful, be relevant, and clear. That doesn’t mean that speakers actually will do that. But if they depart from those expectations we read in a meaning, which he calls an implicature.
p. 151 ceteris paribus = all other things being equal
ANTH 3 (Spring 2006)
For Monday, 3/20,
John Joseph, excerpt from Language and
Identity (website)
This reading is very appropriate for the transition from
Unit 2 to Unit 3. In Unit 2 we looked at
the way code choice and other ways of speaking can be used to express
individual identity. In Unit 3 we will
be looking at controversies about language use.
This reading looks at debates in
p. 134 “RP-accented English”: RP stands for Received Pronunciation, the highest status accent of British English
p. 135 Remember that descriptive approaches to the study of language simply describe, while prescriptive approaches make judgments about right and wrong ways of speaking.
p. 138
taipan: “A foreign businessman or a
trader in
p. 139 interlanguage: “The type of language produced by nonnative speakers in the process of learning a second language or foreign language; a lingua franca.”
p. 141 “count noun
vs. mass noun distinction”: In English,
count nouns are used for objects that considered to be
separate and countable (three books,
ten cars) while mass nouns are used
for objects considered to be formless, uncountable substances (e.g., sand, sugar) or intangible concepts (e.g., honesty). Mass nouns do not
take plurals (you can say three grains of
sand, but not three sands) and in
indefinite constructions are preceded by modifiers such as some or much
rather than a or one.
p. 144 Here and on p. 146
there are diagrams of syntactic structures.
Don’t worry about them. You may
skip the sentences that discuss NP, CNP, CL, CL-P, and so on.
p.
145 *A bowl of rices. The
asterisk indicates a sentence that is considered ungrammatical to a native
speaker of that language or dialect, in this, case to a speaker of SE (Standard
English).
For Wednesday, 3/22
Thompson, “Editor's Introduction” to Language and Symbolic Power (essays by Pierre Bourdieu,
pp. 12-23, website (Read from the arrow marking the beginning to the
line marking the end.)
Zentella introduced us to the theories of the late, great social
theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. This reading explains his ideas, especially
as they pertain to the relation of language to social status. In the last unit we discussed the way one
person might have more power than another.
In this unit we focus on the way the way different codes or speech
varieties endow groups and individuals with more or less cultural capital, to use Bourdieu’s
term. Pay attention to all of the
italicized terms in the reading. Bourdieu’s theories have been widely influential in
anthropology.
For Friday, 3/24, Woolard,
“Sentences in the Language Prison” (website)
In the next two classes we’ll focus on
the politics surrounding bi- and multilingualism in the
For
Monday, March 27, James Crawford’s webpage on issues in the English Only
debate + text of H.R. 123.
Note: this is not on our
class website. Instead, go to ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/engonly.htm
and read that page, then click on the link for HR 123 and read that.
Exercise
Analyze
the discourse of HR 123. What
ideological and cultural assumptions are reflected in its wording? Try to apply Woolard’s
approach.
******************************************************************************************************************************************
For Wednesday, March 29, Labov, “The logic of nonstandard English” website
This
classic discussion reflects the state of debates about AAVE and
African-American school performance 30 years ago. It is in part a reply to Basil Bernstein’s
famous distinction between “restricted codes” (supposed to be typical of
working-class speakers) and “elaborated codes” (supposed to be typical of
middle-class). When Bernstein propounded
this theory he was thinking of
Central to Bernstein's writings is the distinction
between the restricted code and the elaborated code. Some of the differences
between the two codes are:
(i) syntax is more formally correct in the
elaborated code, but looser in the restricted code. There are, for example,
more subordinate clauses in the elaborated code, and fewer unfinished
sentences.
(ii) There are more logical connectives like if and unless in the
elaborated code, whereas the restricted code uses more words of simple
coordination like and and but.
(iii) There is more originality in the elaborated code; there are more
clichés in the restricted code.
(iv) Reference is more explicit in the
elaborated code, more implicit in the restricted code: so the restricted code
uses a greater number of pronouns than the elaborated code (see the example
quoted at length below).
(v) The elaborated code is used to convey facts and abstract ideas, the
restricted code attitude and feeling.
While (i) to (iv) relate at
least in part to the forms of language, (v) relates primarily to the meanings
being conveyed.
Examples which show clearly all the differences between the two codes operating together are difficult to find in Bernstein's articles. One example which particularly illustrates (iv) above is quoted in Bernstein, 1971:194. Two five-year-old children, one working-class and one middle-class, were shown a series of three pictures, which involved boys playing football and breaking a window. They described the events involved as follows:
(1) Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball and it goes through the window and the bail breaks the window and the boys are looking at it and a man comes out and shouts at them because they've broken the window so they run away and then that lady looks out of her window and she tells the boys off.
(2) They're playing football and he kicks it and it goes through there it breaks the window and they're looking at it and he comes out and shouts at them because they've broken it so they run away and then she looks out and she tells them off.
The elaborated code is the one which, in the adult language, would be generally associated with formal situations, the restricted code that associated with informal situations.
In the earlier articles it was implied that middle-class children generally use the elaborated code (although they might sometimes use the restricted code), whereas working-class children have only the restricted code. But Bernstein later modified this viewpoint to say that even working-class children might sometimes use the elaborated code; the difference between the classes is said to lie rather in the occasions on which they can use the codes (e.g. working-class children certainly have difficulty in using the elaborated code in school). Moreover, all children can understand both codes when spoken to them.
Exercise. This will give you a check plus
(=1 ½ ) on your reading comments
Ask
four people to fill out the class survey.
Two should be native English speakers and two should be immigrants to
the
ANTH 3 (Spring 2006)
Friday, 3/31. Cesar Chavez day. No classes.
For Monday, 4/3 Read the information at the following two websites: www.stanford.edu/~rickford/papers/SuiteForEbonyAndPhonics.html + http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/LingAnthro1.html
The first website is a very lucid explanation, by a well known linguist, of some of the features of AAVE (African American Vernacular English, formerly Black English Vernacular, also known as Ebonics).
The second website presents different sides in the debate
over the
For Wednesday, 4/5
Saville-Troike, pp. 188-198
As we’ve come to
expect from Saville-Troike, this is a fascinating
overview of attitudes members of one speech community have toward other speech
communities based on the other community’s distinctive code markers.
p. 188 “both formal and functional aspects of
codes”: formal aspects = grammar, phonology, and lexicon; functional aspects =
how it’s used
p. 191 sandhi rule = Modification of the sound of a word or morpheme when juxtaposed with another, especially in fluent speech (as the modification of the pronunciation of don't in don't you from its pronunciation in isolation or in a phrase like don't we). ( Answers.com)
p. 191 homorganic stop = Non-identical segments having the same point of articulation, e.g., [p], [b] & [m]; [t], [d] & [s]; [k], [g].
p. 191 dissimilation = The process by which a sound becomes dissimilar to another sound
p. 191-2 fortis articulation = Articulated with relatively strong pressure of the airstream below the glottis, as in English (p) and (t) compared with (b) and (d).
No exercise
For 4/7 (Friday) Hartley and
Hartley and Preston
explore stereotypes about different regional dialects in the
pp. 207 Make sure you understand Hartley and
You’ll notice that H&P’s color/shading code inexplicably changes as you go
through the maps. I can’t tell you why.
Exercise
Replicate Hartley and Preston's analysis by interviewing two people to find out
which regional
For Monday, 4/17, Whorf,
“Science and Linguistics” (website) and
Pinker, Excerpt from The Language
Instinct (website)
With these readings we turn to the famous Whorfian Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism, which is the theory that your native language strongly influences or fully determines some aspects of your thought. The reading by Whorf (from 1940) is a short, readable introduction to his ideas. The reading by Pinker is a strong criticism of Whorf’s views.
For all the readings on this topic please think about the following questions:
1. What aspects of language are said to have an influence on thought (according to the proponents of Linguistic Relativity and Determinism)?
2. What aspects of thought are said to be affected?
3. How strong is the influence supposed to be?
4. Which specific claims about the relation of language and thought are supported by the evidence provided by proponents and opponents of Linguistic Relativity and Determinism?
One possible paper topic for this unit is to read some of the experimental research on this topic and evaluate it, guided by these four questions.
p. 111 I assume there is a typo in the First Guy’s line in the joke. It would make more sense if it were “You didn’t sleep with my wife before we were married…”
Here is how I would like you to cite the Pinker reading, if you are going to refer to it in your last paper. You don’t have to follow this format, but it’s helpful to note the original source, in addition to the source for the version you read.
Pinker, Steven. (2003) “Mentalese,” In R. Welsch and K. M. Endicott, eds. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Cultural
Anthropology.
No exercise
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For Wednesday, April 19 Levinson,
“Language and Mind: Let’s Get the Issues Straight!” (website)
This article (by the same Stephen Levinson who co-authored Politeness with Penelope Brown) defends the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis from Pinker and critics like him. This reading gets complex; the following definitions may help you follow his argument.
p. 30 Deictic = A word, the determination of whose referent is dependent on the context in which it is said or written. In the sentence I want him to come here now, the words I, here, him, and now are deictic because the determination of their referents depends on who says that sentence, and where, when, and of whom it is said. (Answers.com)
p. 30 Deictic center = A deictic center is a reference point in relation to which a deictic expression is to be interpreted. (In English, it’s the speaker’s perspective. So “come here” means come to where the speaker is.)
p. 34 Anaphora = Anaphora is coreference of one expression with its antecedent. The antecedent provides the information necessary for the expression’s interpretation. (e.g., pronouns that refer back to a previous expression). Example: My friends came over last night. They stayed a long time.
p. 35 Semantic representation (SR) = Meaning of a word
Conceptual representation (CR) = Mental representation of an idea.
Pinker argued that our conceptual representations take place in a universal mental language, which he calls Mentalese. In other words, speakers of different languages have the same concepts and the same language; only the way they express their concepts differs. Levinson disagrees.
pp. 35-36 What is the decompositional move? Word meanings are built up from basic universal concepts, combined in different ways. These are conceptual primes or primitives or atomic concepts. “So we can cook our varied semantic cakes out of the same old universal flour and sugar.” (Levinson p. 36)
For Friday, 4/21 Boroditsky et al., “Sex, Syntax ,and Semantics” website
Boroditsky explains several pro-Whorfian experiments involving the effects of grammatical gender on the way speakers think of the characteristics of objects categorized as masculine or feminine.
How convinced are you by Boroditsky’s experiments? What version of the Whorfian Hypothesis do they show? What aspect of cognition is affected?
Let me know if you would like to read some more studies from an anti-Whorfian perspective! Also, be sure to read Footnote 1 in Boroditsky’s paper, which points out some of the ways in which speakers of English and other languages without grammatical gender still see objects as gendered!
IN FRIDAY WE’LL HAVE A CLASS
Here is what you will debate: The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences the world view they will acquire as they learn the language.
ANTH 3 (Spring 2006)
For
Monday, 4/24 NOTE CHANGE IN THE
ASSIGNMENT. Read both Lakoff and Johnson,
excerpt from Metaphors We Live By and Quinn, “Research on shared task solutions.” Read the Lakoff
and Johnson first, because Quinn criticizes it.
In the Quinn, you can skip the bottom paragraph on p. 138 on until you
get to “Analysis 1” on p. 140.
With these two readings we turn
from the classic Whorfian issues of how the lexicon and grammar of a language
shapes thought, to the question of whether the way language is used guides the
way people think. These readings focus
on metaphors, that is, figurative language taken from one domain (called the
source domain), and applied to another domain (called the target domain) where
it is not literally applicable. Two
conventional metaphors in contemporary American English usage are drowning in money and time flies.
First, read the assigned excerpt
from Lakoff and Johnson’s famous book, Metaphors We Live
By. They argue that our thinking
about many, many topics is determined by metaphors. They stress consistency, or at least
coherence, in the metaphors that are used to talk about a topic. To take one of their examples, thinking about
love (target domain) is guided by metaphors of journeys (source domain), in
this speech community. That’s why
contemporary Americans say things like, “Look how far we’ve come,” or “I don’t
think this relationship is going anywhere.”
Like Levinson and Pinker, they distinguish the linguistic level (the
expressions people use, like, “Look how far we’ve come”) from the conceptual
level, which they express in capital letters (RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS.) Similar to linguistic relativists like
Levinson, they see a close relationship between the linguistic representation
and the conceptual representation, although they say that culture shapes the
conceptual representation, and then the conceptual representation shapes the
linguistic representation. However,
their examples could also be taken to suggest that the metaphorical expressions
typically used in a society may shape the way speakers think about that topic.
Quinn agrees about that general
causal chain (cultureàconceptsàspeech), but she believes there to be more of a
disconnect between the particular metaphor chosen and the way the
speaker thinks about a topic. She found
that when her interviewees talked about marriage, they switched metaphorical
domains, sometimes referring to marriage as a journey, but sometimes as a
well-made product, a bond, a permanent location, and in many other ways. Her findings would seem to show that there is
little correspondence between any one metaphorical domain and the way people
think about a topic. In her scheme,
speech doesn’t shape thought or directly reflect thought. Instead, people use metaphors as tools to
clarify and express their ideas.
Exercise
Think of several metaphors used to
talk about some topic. Are they
coherent, or not?
For
Wednesday, April 26. Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational
World of Defense Intellectuals” (website)
Cohn talks about the effect that the discourse of military strategists had on the way she started thinking about nuclear weapons. Like Whorfians, she discusses the effects of a way of talking on what one can and cannot think about easily. However, unlike Whorfians, her emphasis is on the effect of their their specialized vocabulary and ways of talking rather than the lexicon and structure of a whole natural language.
Do you think Cohn is advocating a version of the Whorfian Hypothesis (one that applies to learning a particular occupational register, rather than a language)? If so, which version?
Have you had a similar experience of joining a group, learning its ways of speaking, and finding that it affected some aspect of your world view, such as what you notice, how you evaluate experiences, or what you remember?
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For Friday, April 28,
In our last reading for the semester,
The first part of the article on sexist vocabulary, and words used to refer to weapons, will remind you of the Cohn article. You can skim that part quickly; it’s very interesting but also somewhat obvious. Please pay particular attention to the section starting on p. 236, “Sentences and Representation.” Also, on p. 248 see his answer to the question, “What if the writer didn’t intend to convey those meanings?”
In class we’ll give an example of how you would apply these methods, which go by the name of “critical discourse analysis.” If it interests you, we offer other courses on this topic.