Language and Communication

1. Language and Communication • What Is Language • Nonhuman Communication • Nonverbal Communication • The Structure of Language • Language, Thought, and Culture • Sociolinguistics • Historical Linguistics

2. What Is Language? • Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation • Based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent • Primary means of communication (spoken or written)

3. What Is Language? • Conjure up elaborate images • Discuss the past and future • Share experiences with others • Benefit from their experiences • Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context • Allows humans to:

4. Nonhuman Communication • Automatic and cannot be combined • At some point in human development, ancestors began to combine calls and to understand the combinations • Call Systems – limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli

5. Nonhuman Communication • Communication came to rely almost totally on learning • Although primates use call systems, the vocal tract is not suitable for speech • Call Systems • Number of calls expanded, eventually becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through genes

6. Animal Communication • More recent experiments show that apes can learn to use, if not speak, true language • Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs • Sign Language

7. Animal Communication • Washoe and Lucy exhibited several human traits • Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once. • Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family and used ASL to converse with foster parents

8. Nonhuman Communication • Cultural transmission of a communication system through learning is a fundamental attribute of language • Productivity – combined two or more signs to create new expressions • Displacement – ability to talk about things that are not present • Koko and the chimps show apes share linguistic ability with humans

9. Nonhuman Communication • Experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have rudimentary capacity for language • There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own

10. The Origin of Language • Language developed over hundreds of thousands of years from human ancestors’ call systems • Language uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates

11. Language Contrasted with Call Systems

12. Nonverbal Communication • Kinesics – study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions • Linguists pay attention to what is said and how it is said • Body movements communicate social differences

13. The Structure of Language • Phonology – study of speech sounds • Morphology – forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes • Lexicon – dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings • Syntax – arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences • Scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization

14. The Structure of Language • Phoneme – sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning • Phonetics – study of human speech sounds • Phonemics – studies only the significant sound contrasts of given language • Speech Sounds

15. Language, Thought, and Culture • The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways • Noam Chomsky argues human brain contains limited set of rules for organizing language, so all languages have common structural basis

16. Language, Thought, and Culture • Specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups • Vocabulary is area of language that changes most rapidly • Language, culture, and thought are interrelated • Focal Vocabulary

17. Language, Thought, and Culture • Meaning • Ethnosemantics – study of how speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions • The ways people divide up the world – the contrasts they perceive as meaningful or significant – reflect their experiences

18. Focal Vocabulary for Hockey

19. Sociolinguistics • Investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context • Sociolinguists focus on features that vary systematically with social position and situation

20. Linguistic Diversity • Diglossia – regular style shifts between “high” and “low” variants of the same language • We rank certain speech patterns as better or worse because we recognize they are used by groups that we also rank • StyleShifts – varying speech in different contexts

21. Gender Speech Contrasts • In North America and Great Britain, women’s speech tends to be more similar to standard dialect than men’s speech • Men and women have differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as in the body stances and movements that accompany speech

22. Gender Speech Contrasts • Deborah Tannen found that women typically use language and body movements to build rapport, social connections with others • Men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy

23. Language and Status Position • Honorifics – terms used with people to “honor” them • Americans tend to be less formal than other nationalities, although they include honorifics • British have a more developed set of honorifics • Japanese language has several honorifics • Kin terms can be associated with gradations in rank and familiarity

24. Stratification • Our speech habits help determine our access to employment and other material resources • Use and evaluate speech in context of extralinguistic forces – social, political, and economic

25. Sociolinguistics • Linguistic forms take on the power of the groups they symbolize • Linguistic insecurity often felt by lower-class and minority speakers result of symbolic domination • Bourdieu views linguistic practices as symbolic capital that properly trained people may convert into economic and social capital

26. Pronunciation of r in New York City Department Stores

27. Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.) • Most linguists view B.E.V. as a dialect of English rather than a separate language • William Labov writes B.E.V. is “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today . . . ”

28. Black English Vernacular (B.E.V.) • B.E.V. speakers less likely to pronounce r than Standard English (SE) speakers • B.E.V. speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech • Standard English not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect • B.E.V. a complex system of linguistic rules

29. Historical Linguistics • Historical linguists reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages • Long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages

30. Historical Linguistics • Daughter Languages – languages that descend from same parent language and that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years • Protolanguage – original language from which daughter languages descend • Subgroups – languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

31. PIE Family Tree • This is a family tree of the Indo-European languages. All can be traced back to a protolanguage, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken more than 6,000 years ago. PIE split into dialects that eventually evolved into separate languages, which, in turn, evolved into languages such as Latin and proto-Germanic, which are ancestral to dozens of modern daughter languages.