Language and Communication 2

I. Introduction

A. Language is our primary means of communication.
1. Language is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation.
2. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent.
3. Only humans have the linguistic capacity to discuss the past and future in addition to the present.

B. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context.

II. Animal Communication

A. Call Systems
1. Call systems consist of a limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli (e.g. food or danger).
a. Calls cannot be combined to produce new calls.
b. Calls are reflexive in that they are automatic responses to specific stimuli.
2. Although primates use call systems, their vocal tract is not suitable for speech.

B. Sign Language
1. A few nonhuman primates have been able to learn to use American Sign Language (ASL).
a. Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired a vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs.
b. Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family until she was introduced to the “wild” where she was killed by poachers.
c. Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once.
2. These nonhuman primates have displayed some “human-like” capacities with ASL.
a. Joking and lying.
b. Cultural transmission: they have tried to teach ASL to other animals.
c. Productivity: they have combined two or more signs to create new expressions.
d. Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not present.
3. The experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have a rudimentary capacity for language.
a. It is important to remember that humans taught these animals ASL.
b. There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own.

C. The Origin of Language
1. The human capacity for language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems were transformed into language.
2. Language is a uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates.

III. Nonverbal Communication

A. Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures and facial expressions.

B. Odors also play an important role in nonverbal communication.

IV. The Structure of Language

A. The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
1. Phonology is the study of the sound use in speech.
2. Morphology studies the forms in which sounds are grouped in speech.
3. A language’s lexicon is a dictionary containing all of the smallest units of speech that have a meaning (morpheme).
4. Syntax refers to the rules that order words and phrases into sentences.

B. Speech Sounds
1. In any given language, phonemes are the smallest sound contrasts that distinguish meaning (they carry no meaning themselves).
2. Phones are the sounds made by humans that might act as phonemes in any given language.
3. Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds; phonemics is the study of phones as they act in a particular language.
4. Phonemics studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language.

V. Language, Thought, and Culture

A. Chomsky argues that the universal grammar is finite, and the fact that any language is translatable to any other language is taken to be evidence supporting this claim.

B. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Sapir and Whorf are described as early advocates of the view that different languages imply different ways of thinking (e.g., Palaung vs. English, Hopi speculative tense).

C. Focal Vocabulary
1. Lexical elaboration that corresponds to an activity or item that is culturally central is called a focal vocabulary.
2. It is argued that, while language, thought, and culture are interrelated, change is more likely to move from culture to language, rather than the reverse.

D. Meaning
1. Semantics “refers to a language’s meaning system.”
2. Ethnoscience, or ethnosemantics, is the study of linguistic categorization of difference, such as in classification systems, taxonomies, and specialized terminologies (such as astronomy and medicine).

VI. Interesting Issues: Do Midwesterners Have Accents?

A. Every region has its own dialect based on regional patterns of speech, pronunciation, and word choice.

B. Some dialects, like that of Midwestern Americans, have few stigmatized variants that people readily notice.

VII. Sociolinguistics

A. Introduction
1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between linguistic performance and the social context of that performance.
2. The notion that linguistic variation is a product of constantly ongoing general forces for change is called linguistic uniformitarianism.

B. Linguistic Diversity
1. The ethnic and class diversity of nation-states is mirrored by linguistic diversity.
2. Single individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a given setting--this is called style shifting.
3. Diglossia is the regular shifting from one dialect to another (e.g., high and low variants of a language) by members of a single linguistic population.
4. Linguistic relativity says that no language is superior to any other as a means of communication.

C. Gender Speech Contrasts
1. In America and England, there are regular differences between men’s speech and women’s speech that cut across sub-cultural boundaries.
2. The fact that women in these populations tend to speak a more “standard” dialect and use fewer “power” words is attributed to women’s lack of socioeconomic power.

D. Stratification and Symbolic Domination
1. In situations where social stratification exists, the dialect of the dominant strata is considered “standard” and valued more than the dialects of the lower strata.
2. Sociolinguistic studies have indicated that status-linked dialects affect the economic and social prospects of the people who speak them, a situation to which Bourdieu applies the term, symbolic capital.
3. According to Bourdieu, overall societal consensus that one dialect is more prestigious results in “symbolic domination.”

E. In the News: Japan’s Feminine Falsetto
1. Most languages are expressive of and also create gendered differences through grammatical, phonological, or performance patterns.
2. One such gendered style occurs in Japan, wherein the tradition was for women to adopt a stylized, high-pitched voice when speaking in public.
3. This style has begun to disappear as a result of having been challenged through increased awareness of alternatives, some presented directly via feminism, others coming as a more incidental by-product of intercultural contact (e.g., women announcers in the television news).

F. Black English Vernacular (BEV), a.k.a. “Ebonics”
1. Most linguists view BEV as a dialect of American English, with roots in southern English.
2. William Labov writes that BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today…”
3. BEV has its own complex system of linguistic rules; it is not an unstructured selection of words and phrases.
a. BEV speakers do not pronounce intervocalic r’s.
b. BEV speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech.
4. Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect.

VIII. Historical Linguistics

A. Historical linguistics studies the long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages.

B. Anthropologists are interested in historical linguistics because cultural features sometimes correlate with the distribution of language families.

IX. Cyberspace: A New Realm of Communication.

A. Terms
1. Cyberspace: that part of the world that is navigable by computer.
2. AIT: (Advanced Information Technology) is the high technology communications environment that has given rise to cyberspace.

B. AIT as a medium has allowed for the creation of transnational affinity groups and also created means by which populations have begun to resist the pressure of authoritarian governments.
1. These groups and others that are formed around different sorts of interest, as well as the nature of relations among these groups and with the rest of the world, are rapidly becoming the subjects of anthropological inquiry.
2. Transecting groups create direct communication channels between groups that previously had, or otherwise have trouble communicating--e.g. physicians and patients.

C. Access to cyberspace is not equal.
1. Poverty and underdevelopment limit access to cyberspace for some populations.
2. Some governments use artificially high costs to limit the connectivity of ordinary people.
3. Class also affects access in the United States, although this is mitigated somewhat by the existence of public access computers.
4. While class has not been eliminated entirely from cyberspace, some of the markers of class are not as functional--for example, language/writing style in cyberspace is marked by informality.
5. Recent studies have shown that the marking of class and gender still exists, and that some of the gendered dynamics born outside of cyberspace are carried on within it.
6. One area wherein inequality has persisted is in the delivery of the latest high technology equipment to schools, which consistently reflects class and race bias, as well as socioeconomic inequality.
7. “Netiquette” is the term applied to uses and styles deemed appropriate and polite in cyberspace communication (such as the avoidance of using all capital letters, which connotes strong emotion or “shouting”).

D. Elitism and Gate-keeping Cyberspace
1. As access and interest have increased the numbers of people using the Internet, “Old Guard” vs. “New Guard” elitism has developed.
2. As use has broadened, problematic and criminal practices on the Internet have also increased, generating a corresponding interest in the regulation of such communication (e.g., laws against pornography on the Internet).
3. There are also techniques employed by ordinary users and sysops (“systems operators”) to prevent and punish transgression of various ilk.
4. Kottak applies the term “gatekeepers” to people who enforce the various regulations and norms of Internet communication.

E. The fluidity of social reality in cyberspace
1. The various uses of cyberspace and computer technology have generated a whole new realm of ways to manipulate one’s identity (e.g., role-playing games, presenting various selves in course of cyberspace conversations, etc.).
2. The relationship between cyberspace behavior and behavior in “face-to-face” communities is under investigation.

Assignment: In clean sheets of paper, answer the following:

Primate Language: Read the page entitled "Primate Use of Language" created by Lauren Kosseff at http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/psych26/language.htm.
a. Who was Kanzi? What abilities with language did Kanzi demonstrate?
b. Who was Washoe? What abilities with language did Washoe demonstrate?
c. Who was Loulis? What abilities with language did Loulis demonstrate?
d. Who was Nim? What abilities with language did Nim demonstrate?
e. Do you think that language is uniquely human? Which parts of human language do primates possess?