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Penelope Brown (born 1944 in Summit, NJ) is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition.
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Penelope Brown (born 1944 in Summit, NJ) is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition.
Brown earned a BA in Psychology from Carleton College 1965 and an M.A. in Anthropology and Linguistics from the University of Iowa in 1970. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 under the supervision of John J. Gumperz. Her dissertation is titled, "Language, interaction, and sex roles in a Mayan community: a study of politeness and the position of women."
Brown was the co-developer of the theory of politeness, a key topic in 20th century sociolinguistics. With her research collaborator and husband, linguist Stephen Levinson, she is co-author of the seminal work, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage [1] [2] (cited more than 30,000 times). This book was first published in 1978 (and was republished with a new introduction, corrections, and a new bibliography in 1987 [3] ).
Brown worked in the field for a number of years with Tzeltel Maya speakers in Mexico, and has also worked in Rossel Island in Papua New Guinea. [4]
She is currently an emeritus member of the Language Acquisition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
She earned the Stirling Prize for Best Work in Psychological Anthropology in 1992. [5]
Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. He is known for "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis," the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. This principle has been named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, which was initially called linguistic relativity by Whorf because he saw the idea as having implications similar to Einstein’s principle of physical relativity. The idea, however, follows from post-Hegelian 19th-century philosophy, especially from Wilhelm von Humboldt; and from Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie.
The hypothesis 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 affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
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).
Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in another cultural context.
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
John Joseph Gumperz was an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.
Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Politeness theory, proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, centers on the notion of politeness, construed as efforts on redressing the affronts to a person's self-esteems or effectively claiming positive social values in social interactions. Such self-esteem is referred as the sociological concept of face to discuss politeness as a response to mitigate or avoid face-threatening acts such as requests or insults. Notable components in the framework of the theory include positive and negative faces, face threatening act (FTA), strategies for doing FTAs and factors influencing the choices of strategies; each described below.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. The institute was founded in 1980 by Pim Levelt, and is particular for being entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of the few institutes of the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 5th position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes. It currently employs about 235 people.
Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp (1927–2018) was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.
Melissa Bowerman was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982-2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
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.
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies. In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019.
Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK.
Soonja Choi is a linguist originally from South Korea, specializing in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean.
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