NO ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS

***FRIDAY, SEPT 13th***

(All 100- and 200-level classes between 10 and 11 are cancelled for orientation)

***FRIDAY, OCT 4th***

Language and Communication II

Descriptive LinguisticsHistorical Linguistics

Sociolinguistics

Descriptive Linguistics

• Meaningful sounds and sound sequences are combined according to rules often not consciously known by the speakers

• Phonology, morphology and syntax

Phonology

• Phonology: Study of a language’s sound system

• Phones: Different sounds that the human vocal tract can make– No single language uses all possible sounds or phones– Transcribed using phonemic alphabet

• Phoneme: minimal unit of sound that signals a difference in meaning– Example: LAKE and RAKE

Morphology

• Morphology: study of sequences of sounds that have meaning (word formation)

• Morpheme: Smallest unit in a language with meaning (such as prefixes, suffixes, root words)

• Morpheme: One or more morphs with the same meaning– Free morphemes stand alone: Toast, Giraffe– Bounded morphemes have no meaning except when

attached to morpheme: Toast + er = Toaster; Giraffe + s = Giraffes

Syntax

• Patterning of phrases and sentences– Along with morphology, makes up grammar

Historical Linguistics

• Study of how languages change over time

• Goals:

– Reconstruct features of ancestral languages (proto-

languages) of modern languages

– Hypothesize how offspring languages separated from

proto-language

• Language family: All languages derived from same proto-

language

– Establish approximate dates of separation

“I saw Uncle Bob on 42nd Street.”• Mian: the verb would reveal if the event happened just now, yesterday,

or the distant past

• Indonesian: verb wouldn’t indicate whether it had happened or was coming up soon

• Russian: verb would reveal speaker’s gender

• Mandarin: would specify if uncle was maternal or paternal and by blood or marriage

• Pirahã: could not specify “42nd” because no words for exact quantities – “few” “many” etc.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf

• Language affects how individuals perceive and conceive reality

Gender Identity Formation for Hebrew, Finnish, & English speakers

• 1983 - Alexander Guiora - University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: Do children develop gender identity earlier when their language emphasizes gender?

• Compared three groups of kids growing up with Hebrew, English or Finnish as their native language– Hebrew: All nouns masculine or feminine, even second-person and plural

pronouns– English: Differentiates gender only in third-person singular– Finnish: Words such as man and woman convey gender, but differentiation of

gender is otherwise lacking

• Children growing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children; English-speaking kids fall in the middle

Explaining Directions in Pormpuraaw

• Pormpuraaw - a remote Aboriginal community in Australia

• Everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), instead of “right” or “left”– Example: Instead of “There is a

• About a third of the world's languages rely on absolute directions for space - Speakers are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are even in unfamiliar landscapes

• They perform navigational feats once thought were beyond human capabilities

Sociolinguistics

• Study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speech variation in different social contexts– Honorifics and social status– Gender differences– Multilingualism and Codeswitching

Examples of Gender Speech Differences

• Entirely different words to describe the same concept– Example- Japan: WATER – Men: mizu; women:

ohiya • Differences in intonation and phrasing

– Example- USA: