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Language and Communication

Language and Communication. What Is Language Nonhuman Communication Nonverbal Communication The Structure of Language Language, Thought, and Culture Sociolinguistics Historical Linguistics. What Is Language?. Transmitted through learning as part of enculturation

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Language and Communication

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  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.

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