Anthropological Linguistics (Activity)

Introduction to Linguistics Antropology

Introduction to Linguistics Anthropology

Linguistics anthropology (or ethnolinguistics) is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of the language as a culture resource and speaking and speaking as a culture practice (Linguistics Anthropology). The origin of this term lies in the nineteen century western anthropology, where ethnography was a descriptive account of a community or culture, usually one located outside the west. At that time it was seen as complementary of ethnology which is more an historical and comparative analysis of non-western societies and cultures.

The domain of ethnolinguistics extends in different thematic areas which language and the sociocultural contexts are treated together, involving diverse connections between linguistics and anthropology.

The Ethnographer Work

In terms of data collection, the ethnographer usually involves the research participating, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what they said, and/or asking questions though formal or informal interviews, collecting documents and artifacts. (Ethnography Principles)

Ethnography of Communication

One of the biggest contributors is maybe the anthropologist that has done more contributions to the first studies of context. His article in 1962 about what he determined as Ethnography of communication is the starting point of an influent paradigm in the anthropology itself, as like the fist research, and the first of the research trends that contribute the opening to the contemporary in discourse studies in the 1960s (Foundation in Sociolinguistics).

Teun A. van Dijk in his book “Sociedad y discurso” quoted the definition done by Hymes  in “Foundation of sociolinguistics” In which he defined the ethnography of communications as the study of  “situations and uses, the patrons and the functions of speaking as an activity with its own right” (Van Dijk, 2011)

The Hyme’s work influence has been so widely mark by contemporary authors  that the ethnography of communication has been used in different work frames such as in sociolinguistics, analysis of discourse, sociology, and more.

Copenhagen School

It was founded by Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Viggo Brondal (1887–1942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centees of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School.  Together they founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

Hjelmslev’s more formalist approach attracted a group of followers, principal among them Hans Jorgen Uldall and Eli Fischer Jorgensen, who would strive to apply his abstract ideas of the nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data. Hjelmslev’s objective was to establish a framework for understanding communication as a formal system, and an important part of this was the development of precise terminology to describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their interrelatedness. The basic theoretical framework, called “Glossematic” was laid out in Hjelmslev’s two main works: Prolegomena to a theory of Language and Résumé of a theory of Language. However, since Hjelmslev's death in 1965 left his theories mostly on the programmatic level.

 In 1989, a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal, and other important Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics. Among the prominent members of this new generation of the Copenhagen School of Linguistics were Peter Harder, Elisabeth Engberg Petersen, Frans Gregersen and Michael Fortescue. The basic work of the school is Dansk Funktionel Grammatik (Danish Functional Grammar) by Harder (2006).

School of Prague

Tl2 school ofprague from Ángel de León

The Prague School (Activity)

School of Prague (Activity) hangman game » make hangman

Saussure: language as a social fact (Activity)

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Saussure: language as social fact

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, was born in Geneva in 1857. He was the son of a Huguenot family, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. 

Saussure was trained as a linguist of the conventional, historical variety, and became outstandingly succesful as such at a very early age: his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenns (1878), remains one of the landmarks in the recostruction of Proto-Indo-European. Saussure lectured at the École Practique des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891.

At the end of 1906, Saussure taught the course 'General linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages', and in the 1908-9 and 1910-11 sessions.

Thanks to him the emphasis of the language shifted from language change to language description. His insistence than language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.

He died in 1913 without having published any theoretical material. Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided to reconstruct them from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure's thought became known to the scholary world. It is in virtue of this work that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.