Elinor Ochs

Last updated

Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. [1] [2] Ochs has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Italy, Samoa and the United States of America on communication and interaction. [3] Together with Bambi Schieffelin, Professor Ochs developed language socialization, a field of inquiry which examines the ways in which individuals become competent members of communities of practice to and through the use of language. [3] [4] Professor Ochs is also known for her contributions to applied linguistics and the theorization of narrative and family discourse. [3]

Contents

In the USA, Professor Ochs has conducted research on a wide range of topics including the social construction of knowledge in a physics laboratory, sociality and autism, and the socialization of morality in family discourse. [3] The last was conducted during her decade long tenure as the director for the Center on Everyday Lives of Families, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families Program on Dual-Career Working Middle Class Families. [5] In 1998, Professor Ochs was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to the study of language. [6]

Awards

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialization</span> Lifelong process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies

In sociology, socialization or socialisation is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained".

Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institution</span> Structure or mechanism of social order

Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Ladefoged</span> British phonetician (1925–2006)

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician.

Language ideology is, within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their social worlds. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are influenced by political and moral interests, and they are shaped in a cultural setting. When recognized and explored, language ideologies expose how the speakers' linguistic beliefs are linked to the broader social and cultural systems to which they belong, illustrating how the systems beget such beliefs. By doing so, language ideologies link implicit and explicit assumptions about a language or language in general to their social experience as well as their political and economic interests.

Don Kulick is professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.

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.

Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Along with his collaborators Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff is regarded as the creator of the field of Conversation Analysis.

Charles Leslie Briggs is an anthropologist who works at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Before working at Berkeley he held a position as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at University of California, San Diego.

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.

Bambi B. Schieffelin is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University (NYU) in the department of Anthropology. Along with Elinor Ochs, she pioneered the field of language socialization. In addition, she has written extensively about language contact, language ideology, literacy, Haitian Creole, and missionization.

Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.

John G. Fleagle is an American anthropologist, primatologist, and Distinguished Professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaluli people</span>

The Kaluli are a clan of indigenous peoples who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli, who numbered approximately 2,000 people in 1987, are the most numerous and well documented by post-contact ethnographers and missionaries among the four language-clans of Bosavi kalu that speak non-Austronesian languages. Their numbers are thought to have declined precipitously following post-contact disease epidemics in the 1940s, and have not rebounded due to high infant mortality rates and periodic influenza outbreaks. The Kaluli are mostly monolingual in an ergative language.

Social media language learning is a method of language acquisition that uses socially constructed Web 2.0 platforms such as wikis, blogs, and social networks to facilitate learning of the target language. Social media is used by language educators and individual learners that wish to communicate in the target language in a natural environment that allows multimodal communication, ease of sharing, and possibilities for feedback from peers and educators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathryn Woolard</span> American linguistic anthropologist

Kathryn Ann Woolard is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in linguistic anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul V. Kroskrity</span> American linguistic anthropologist

Paul V. Kroskrity is an American linguistic anthropologist known primarily for his contributions to establishing and developing language ideology as a field of research. He is professor of anthropology, applied linguistics, and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and past Chair of the American Indian Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Guardado</span>

Martin Guardado is a Salvadorian-born Canadian sociolinguist. He is currently a professor of sociocultural linguistics and applied linguistics at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on heritage language socialization and teaching English as a second language. He is noted for his work on heritage language socialization and for recommending that heritage languages need to be studied multidimensionally as well as from macro and micro perspectives. His recent and current research respectively examines the experiences of Japanese-Canadian mothers in mixed language families in Montreal and the characteristics of mixed language parents across a number of linguistic groups in Alberta.

Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh.

References

  1. "Professor Elinor Ochs". Archived from the original on August 5, 2012.
  2. "Faculty".
  3. 1 2 3 4 García-Sanchez, Inmaculada (January 2013). "Elinor Ochs". The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics.
  4. Ochs and Schieffelin (1984). "Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories". Culture Theory: Essays of Mind, Self, and Emotion.
  5. "UCLA SLOAN CELF Center". www.celf.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  6. 1 2 "Elinor R. Ochs — MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Professor, Curriculum Vitae". UCLA Department of Anthropology, Faculty Page. UCLA Department of Anthropology. Retrieved 2016-03-21.
  8. "UCLA SLOAN CELF Center". www.celf.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2016-03-22.