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Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the cultural behavior of the people who speak that language. [1]
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Ethnolinguists study the way perception and conceptualization influences language and show how that is linked to different cultures and societies. An example is how spatial orientation is expressed in various cultures. [2] [3] In many societies, words for the cardinal directions east and west are derived from terms for sunrise/sunset. The nomenclature for cardinal directions of Inuit speakers of Greenland, however, is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast. Similarly, the Yurok lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the Klamath River.
Cultural Linguistics is a related branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. [4] Cultural Linguistics draws on and expands the theoretical and analytical advancements in cognitive science (including complexity science and distributed cognition) and anthropology. Cultural linguistics examines how various features of human languages encode cultural conceptualisations, including cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. [4] In Cultural Linguistics, language is viewed as deeply entrenched in the group-level, cultural cognition of communities of speakers. Thus far, the approach of Cultural Linguistics has been adopted in several areas of applied linguistic research, including intercultural communication, second language learning, Teaching English as an International Language, and World Englishes. [5]
Ethnosemantics, also called ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology, is a method of ethnographic research and ethnolinguistics that focuses on semantics [6] by examining how people categorize words in their language. Ethnosemantics studies the way people label and classify the cultural, social, and environmental phenomena in their world and analyze the semantic categories these classifications create in order to understand the cultural meanings behind the way people describe things in their world. [7] [8] [9]
Ethnosemantics as a method relies on Franz Boas' theory of cultural relativity, as well as the theory of linguistic relativity. The use of cultural relativity in ethnosemantic analysis serves to focus analyses on individual cultures and their own language terms, rather than using ethnosemantics to create overarching theories of culture and how language affects culture. [8]
In order to perform ethnosemantic analysis, all of the words in a language that are used for a particular subject are gathered by the researcher and are used to create a model of how those words relate to one another. Anthropologists who utilize ethnosemantics to create these models believe that they are a representation of how speakers of a particular language think about the topic being described.
For example, in her book The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Harriet Ottenheimer uses the concept of plants and how dandelions are categorized to explain how ethnosemantics can be used to examine the differences in how cultures think about certain topics. In her example, Ottenheimer describes how the topic "plants" can be divided into the two categories "lettuce" and "weeds". Ethnosemantics can help anthropologists to discover whether a particular culture categorizes "dandelions" as a "lettuce" or a "weed", and using this information can discover something about how that culture thinks about plants. [7]
In one section of Oscar Lewis' La Vida, he includes the transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican woman in which she discusses a prostitute's social world. Using ethnosemantics, the speaker's statements about the people in that social circle and their behavior can be analyzed in order to understand how she perceives and conceptualizes her social world. The first step in this analysis is to identify and map out all of the social categories or social identities the speaker identified. Once the social categories have been mapped, the next steps are to attempt to define the precise meaning of each category, examine how the speaker describes the relationship of categories, and analyze how she evaluates the characteristics of the people who are grouped in those social categories. [10] The speaker in this example identified three basic social categories-- the rich, the law, and the poor-- and characterized those people in the higher categories of "rich" and "law" as bad people. The poor are further divided into those with disreputable positions and those with reputable positions. The speaker characterizes the disreputable poor generally as dishonest and corrupt, but presents herself as one of the few exceptions. This analysis of the speaker's description of her social circle thus allows for an understanding of how she perceives the world around her and the people in it. [10]
Another method that is used in ethnosemantic analysis is componential analysis. Componential analysis is used to describe the criteria people use to classify concepts [10] by analyzing their semantic features. For example, the word "man" can be analyzed into the semantic features "male," "mature," and "human"; "woman" can be analyzed into "female," "mature," and "human"; "girl" can be analyzed into "female," "immature," and "human"; and "bull" can be analyzed into "male," "mature," and "bovine." [11] By using this method, the features of words in a category can be examined to form hypotheses about the significant meaning and identifying features of words in that category. [10]
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
The idea of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into other languages, she is a prolific writer.
Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives. It is based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The theory was formally developed by Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University in the early 1970s, and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University.
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.
Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide an explanatory semantic representation. Explanatory in this sense refers to the ability of a given linguistic theory to describe how a component of language is acquired by a child.
Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
Componential analysis is the analysis of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as "present", "absent" or "indifferent with reference to feature". The method thus departs from the principle of compositionality. Componential analysis is a method typical of structural semantics which analyzes the components of a word's meaning. Thus, it reveals the culturally important features by which speakers of the language distinguish different words in a semantic field or domain.
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and served as Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA from 2009 to 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how. This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Among the most debated theories in this area of work is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.
Cliff Goddard is a professor of linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is, with Anna Wierzbicka, a leading proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic analysis. Goddard's research has explored cognitive and cultural aspects of everyday language and language use. He is considered a leading scholar in the fields of semantics and cross-cultural pragmatics. His work spans English, indigenous Australian languages, and South East Asian languages.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
Ethnoscience has been defined as an attempt "to reconstitute what serves as science for others, their practices of looking after themselves and their bodies, their botanical knowledge, but also their forms of classification, of making connections, etc.".
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.
Farzad Sharifian was a pioneer of cultural linguistics and held the Chair in Cultural Linguistics at Monash University. He developed a theoretical and an analytical framework of cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations, and language, which draw on and expands the analytical tools and theoretical advancements in several disciplines and sub-disciplines, including cognitive psychology, anthropology, distributed cognition, and complexity science. The theoretical/analytical frameworks and their applications in several areas of applied linguistics including intercultural communication, cross-cultural/intercultural pragmatics, World Englishes, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), and political discourse analysis are the subject of Sharifian’s monographs entitled Cultural Conceptualisations and Language and Cultural Linguistics. These books have widely been recognised as laying "solid theoretical and analytical grounds for what can be recognised as Cultural Linguistics"..
The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi have a concept of time.
Cognitive sociolinguistics is an emerging field of linguistics that aims to account for linguistic variation in social settings with a cognitive explanatory framework. The goal of cognitive sociolinguists is to build a mental model of society, individuals, institutions and their relations to one another. Cognitive sociolinguists also strive to combine theories and methods used in cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics to provide a more productive framework for future research on language variation. This burgeoning field concerning social implications on cognitive linguistics has yet received universal recognition.
