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CHAPTER 11
LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter introduces students to the study of linguistics. It discusses the basic categories and
definitions used to study language, and the many ways in which language, culture, and social action
intersect.
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
1.
You should be familiar with nonverbal forms of communication like gestures, expressions, and
movements.
2.
You need to be able to identify the key structures of language.
3.
You must be familiar with the central argument of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and what
researchers think of it today.
4.
You need to know what focal vocabularies are and why they exist.
5.
You must know what sociolinguists study. In particular, you must be familiar with gender speech
patterns and how social stratification manifests itself in language.
6.
You must know what BEV is and how it compares to SE In addition, you need to be familiar
with the debate regarding BEV and public school systems.
7.
You should know what historical linguists study and how it relates to anthropology.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. Every region has its own dialect based on regional patterns of speech, pronunciation, and word
choice.
B. Some dialects, like that of Midwestern Americans, have few stigmatized variants that people
readily notice.
II. Language
A. Language is our primary means of communication.
1. Language is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation.
2. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they
represent.
3. Only humans have the linguistic capacity to discuss the past and future in addition to the
present.
B. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context.
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III. Nonverbal Communication
A. Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures and facial
expressions.
B. Despite the importance of nonverbal communication, language is the most important means of
symbolic communication.
IV. The Structure of Language
A. The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: phonology,
morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
1. Phonology is the study of the sounds used in speech.
2. Morphology studies the forms in which sounds are grouped in speech.
3. A language’s lexicon is a dictionary containing all of the smallest units of speech that have a
meaning (morpheme).
4. Syntax refers to the rules that order words and phrases into sentences.
B. Speech Sounds
1. In any given language, phonemes are the smallest sound contrasts that distinguish meaning
(they carry no meaning themselves).
2. Phones are the sounds made by humans that might act as phonemes in any given language.
3. Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds, phonemics is the study of phones as they act
in a particular language.
4. Phonemics study only the significant sound contrasts of a given language.
V. Language, Thought, and Culture
A. Chomsky argues that the universal grammar is finite, and the fact that any language is translatable
to any other language is taken to be evidence supporting this claim.
B. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Sapir and Whorf argued that the grammatical categories of
different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways (e.g., Palaung vs.
English, Hopi speculative tense).
C. Focal Vocabulary
1. Lexical elaboration that corresponds to an activity or item that is culturally central is called a
focal vocabulary.
2. It is argued that, while language, thought, and culture are interrelated, change is more likely to
move from culture to language, rather than the reverse.
D. Meaning
1. Semantics refers to a language’s meaning system.
2. The ways in which people divide up the world—the lexical contrasts they perceive as
meaningful or significant—reflect their experiences.
VI. Sociolinguistics
A. Introduction
1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between linguistic performance and the social
context of that performance.
2. The notion that linguistic variation is a product of constantly ongoing general forces for
change is called linguistic uniformitarianism.
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B. Linguistic Diversity within Nations
1. The ethnic and class diversity of nation-states is mirrored by linguistic diversity.
2. Single individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a
given setting--this is called style shifting.
3. Diglossia is the regular shifting from one dialect to another (e.g., high and low variants of a
language) by members of a single linguistic population.
4. Linguistic relativity says that no language is superior to any other as a means of
communication.
C. Gender Speech Contrasts
1. In America and England, there are regular differences between men’s speech and women’s
speech that cut across sub-cultural boundaries.
2. The fact that women in these populations tend to speak a more standard dialect and use fewer
power words is attributed to women’s lack of socioeconomic power.
D. Stratification and Symbolic Domination
1. In situations where social stratification exists, the dialect of the dominant strata is considered
standard and valued more than the dialects of the lower strata.
2. Sociolinguistic studies have indicated that status-linked dialects affect the economic and
social prospects of the people who speak them, a situation to which Bourdieu applies the term,
symbolic capital.
3. According to Bourdieu, overall societal consensus that one dialect is more prestigious results
in symbolic domination.
E. Black English Vernacular (BEV), a.k.a. Ebonics
1. Most linguists view BEV as a dialect of American English, with roots in southern English.
2. William Labov writes that BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of
black youth in most parts of the U.S. today…”
3. BEV has its own complex system of linguistic rules; it is not an unstructured selection of
words and phrases.
a. BEV speakers do not pronounce intervocalic r’s.
b. BEV speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech.
4. Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige
dialect.
VII. Historical Linguistics
A. Historical linguistics studies the long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and
daughter languages.
B. Anthropologists are interested in historical linguistics because cultural features sometimes
correlate with the distribution of language families.
VIII. Box: Using Modern Technology to Preserve Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
A. Global linguistic diversity is falling at an increasing rate.
B. Some anthropologists are teaching native speakers of endangered languages to document their
languages by way of a computer program that encodes speech.
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LECTURE TOPICS
1.
Many students are puzzled by the concepts of deep structure, surface structure, and
transformations. Present them with several examples, some from different languages. You may
wish to relate ape language experiments to your discussion of human neurologically based
language capacities.
2.
Students often find it difficult to believe that they filter out some sounds, that they are not
sensitive to all the differences to which other language speakers are sensitive, or that other
speakers cannot hear differences that are important to them. Illustrate the principles with clear
examples of at least two languages.
3.
As with many monolingual people, most American students believe that their words are a simple
reflection of the natural world. They find it hard to recognize the conventionality or the semantic
“bundling” that occurs in their words. They have a tendency to believe that other languages are
essentially a word-for-word replacement of their own. Accordingly, present to them words from
languages related to English, such as French and German, that are similar, but have a quite
different connotation or range of meaning. Give them words or phrases from another language
that can be translated only clumsily into English.
4.
Many students have a hard time understanding the debate over BEV Discuss what BEV is and
clarify what the debate is over. Many students think that proponents of BEV are demanding that
it be taught in schools just like Spanish, German, or French.
SUGGESTED FILMS
Washoe: Apes and Sign Language
1994 53 minutes
This film was made by the researchers who worked with Washoe and shows how Washoe acquired and
used sign language. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
The Ape: So Human!
1998 41 minutes
This film presents the experiments by Allen and Beatrix Gardner, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and other
primatologists related to chimpanzee behavior. Particular attention is paid to cognition, self-awareness,
memory retention, language use, social behavior, and mating practices. From Films for the Humanities
and Sciences.
Language
1999 53 minutes
This film traces the history of language and media from the invention of the printing press to the Internet.
From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
The Ideas of Chomsky
1977 47 minutes
This film traces the contributions that Chomsky has made to linguistics. A BBC Production.
The Language of the Body
1994 50 minutes
This film explores kinesics across five continents discussing hand gestures, both friendly and insulting,
facial expressions, headshakes, and body distance. Contains nudity. A Discovery Channel Production.
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