Key Topics In Linguistic Anthropology
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cB2 2Ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title www.cambridge.org 9780521849418 Cambridge University Press 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the...
Contributors
charles taylor, Department of Philosophy, McGill University john leavitt, Department of Anthropology, Universite de Montreal regna darnell, Department of Anthropology, University of Western-Ontario penelope brown, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands paul kay, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley monica heller, CREFO, OISE, Universite de Toronto elinor ochs, Department of Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles bambi schieffelin,...
Language socialization
Sentences such as I declare the meeting adjourned, or I bet you 50 the Cubs will win the World Series before the end of the century are known to philosophers as performatives, in that the speaker performs the act of adjourning a meeting or making a bet by the very fact of having uttered these words. As analyzed by Austin 1975 , performatives conventionally presuppose the conditions for their successful performance, and have conventional entailments, i.e. their successful performance brings...
The ethnolinguistic perspective
Europe, 1937. Nazi Germany rearms, enemies of the people die before Soviet firing squads, the Luftwaffe tests its weapons on the Basque city of Guernica. Aldous Huxley watches two cats preparing to fight balefully the eyes glare from far down in the throat of each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance . . . Another moment and surely there must be an explosion. But no all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns away, hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with...
Translation and hermeneutics
Leaving aside what the Arrentes might have thought about their encounter, the ethnographers Spencer and Gillen probably considered themselves to have been engaged in the work of translation, or rather hermeneutics, the interpretation of difficult, chronologically or culturally distant texts. Habermas 1983 258 distinguished three major stances among social scientists with regard to the project of interpretation. The first, hermeneutic objectivism, continues to pin its hopes on what Dilthey...
Linguistic relativity
On hearing the term linguistic anthropology, the first thing that comes to many readers' minds is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, generally understood as the principle that language conditions habits of speech which in turn organize and generate particular patterns of thought. But linguistic anthropology has likewise a contribution to make to the debate between particularism and univer-salism, which is once again a subject of interest in many sectors of American anthropology. One sign of this...
Language contact
The phenomena that are described by the term contact in anthropology and in linguistic anthropology have challenged conceptions of culture and language as whole, bounded and organic entities. At the core of that challenge lie two issues first, how to understand the processes of contact itself with regard to such a reified understanding of culture and second, how to analyze the effects of contact-induced change. These two questions have forced anthropologists to engage with the issue of change...