Anthropological Linguistics

Activity about Antrhopological Linguistic

The descriptivists

During the years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when Saussure was working out his ideas in Europe, synchronic linguistics was emerging independently, and in a very different style, in America under the leadership of the anthropologist Franz Boas.

I use the term Descriptivist linguistics for the school funded by Boas, for reasons that will be discussed shortly. Since, throughout the twentieth century, the great majority of synchronic linguistics have been Americans, it has often seemed that Descriptivist linguistics was linguistics.

Franz Boas, born in Westphalia, began his academic career as a student of physics and geography, and it was through the latter subject that he came to anthropology.

Boas specialized in the anthropology of North American, and, after a short period teaching in Berlin, he settled in the USA in the late 1880s. Boas’s introduced to it contains what is still a good summary of the descriptivist approach to language.  

The nature of the language dealt with was one of the chief differences between the Boasian and Saussurean traditions. Saussure had seized the attention of the scholarly world by inventing a new way of looking at phenomena which had been so familiar for so long that it seemed impossible for them still to hold any surprise.

Boas and his colleagues, on the other hand, were faced with the severely practical problem of working out what the current structure of various utterly alien language was like.

The Descriptivist tended to think of abstract linguistic theorizing as a means to the end of successful practical description of particular language, rather than thinking of individual languages as sources of data for the construction of a general theory of language.

Saussure arguing that language imposes an arbitrary structuring on the intrinsically unstructured domains of sound and meaning; Boas showed how this phenomenon produces a false appearance of primitiveness in languages which are in fact fully comparable with our own.

What is true of sound systems is just as true of the syntactic and semantic aspects of language. Two points are often claimed to be characteristics of primitive language. On the hand they are said to be vague; thus, many languages fail to distinguish singular from plural. On the other hand, they are claimed to deal only in the concrete and not to tolerate the information of abstract concepts.

Boas furthermore makes the very apposite point that abstract terms are created when philosophers bend a language to their purpose; since philosophy is a minority this is always a somewhat artificial procedure, but it need be no more artificial for language in which no one has yet philosophized than it is for the classical languages of philosophy. Logical terms such as quality, essence, now commonplace in the language of Europe.

Boas must unquestionably take pride of place in any account of the Descriptivist school; he created the tradition which moulded the work of all other members of the school. But the man who is nowadays taken as principal representative of the Descriptivist school, and is read by many more linguists than read Boans today, is Leonard Bloomfield. He was a nephew of a leading American historical linguist, Maurice Bloomfield.

The logical positivists, there were only two basic kinds of meaningful statements: logical propositions such as Either P or not P, and reports of simple sense-data.

Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method: a rule which says that the only things that may be used to confirm or refute a scientific theory are interpersonally observable phenomena, rather than, say, people’s introspections or intuitions.

Linguistics descriptions was reliable insofar as it was based on observation of unstudied utterances by speakers; it was unreliable if the analyst hand resorted to asking speakers questions such as can you say so-and-so in you language?

The folklorist may be interested in Englishmen´s beliefs about English; the linguist must concentrate rather on how Englishmen speak when they are not thinking about their language.

Many behaviourist psychologists, however, confused the methodological issue with matter of a substantive belief.

The breaches of linguistics description called phonology, morphology, and syntax are all concerned with different types of pattering observable in speech data.

Bloomfield, to analyse meaning in a language is to show what stimuli evoke given utterances s responses, and what behavioural responses are evoke by given spoken stimuli. Thus Bloomfield´s conclusions that semantic analysis is impossible were sound, even if his reasoning was defective.

Bloomfield turned mind and imagination into taboo terms, but he would probably nevertheless have approved of some version of that idea once it had been translated into behaviourist vocabulary.

Descriptivist concern was with the production of correct theories about individual languages.

The Descriptivists, then, thought of general linguistics more as a body of techniques of beliefs about the nature of language.

The descriptivist practice, it seems to me, was essentially what the linguistics ought to be. They were confused about some issues and wrong about others, but their errors were of very little consequence by comparison with the errors of their successors. The descriptivist tradition is that represented by the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, under the academic leadership of Kenneth Pike.

Pragmatics

Over the past 30 years or so, pragmatics has grown into a well-established, secure, discipline in institution terms.

Pragmatic Perspectives on Language Use

This section use a brief dialogue in order to introduce some important terms and concepts in modern pragmatics and to illustrate briefly the sorts of phoneme that pragmatics needs to account for.

Pragmatic Meaning

Semantic is to describe and explain linguistics meaning, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the study of the meaning that linguistic expressions receive in use. Pragmatics is to explain how participant in a dialogue such as the one above move from the decontextualized meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context. 

Assigning Reference in Context

Sometimes the process of identifying pragmatic meaning involves interpreting ambiguous and vague linguistic expression in order to assign them sense context. Pragmatics plays a role in explaining how the thought expressed by a given utterance on a given occasion is recovered by the addressee.

Inferring Illocutionary Force

 Another element to the working out of pragmatics involves interpreting the illocutionary force of utterances. The philosopher John Austin and developed by another philosopher John Searle, views language as a form of action.

Austin´s initial insight was that people do not simply make statements that can be judge as true or false; rather, they use language to perform actions that have an impact in some way on the world. Both he and Searle tried to classify speech acts into different categories, and to identify the felicity condition that enable speech act to performed successfully.

Working Out Implicated Meaning

The main import of n utterance may, in fact, easily lie not with the thought expressed by the utterance (that is the communicated directly) but rather with the thought(s) that the hearer assumes the speaker intends to suggest or hint at.

He most influential solution to this problem was developed in the mid-1960s by the Oxford philosopher Paul Grice. He argued that people are disposed to presume that communicative behavior is guided by set of principal and norms, which he called the Co-operative Principle and maxims of conversation.

Deriving an interpretation that satisfies the Co-operative Principle is effected through four maxims which the communicator is presumed to abide by: Truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and style.

The challenge of describing and explaining the reasoning process involved in communication has also been taken up by cognitive approaches to pragmatics, such as Sperber and Wilson´s relevance theory, which maintains that the reasoning process involved in communication are constrained by a single principle: the principle of relevance, making the Co-operative Principle and the maxims of quality, quality and manner redundant.

Explaining the Impact of Social Factors 

Grice´s theory of conversation, and in particular his view that conversation is governed by a set of norms, pointed to the importance of investigating the social regularities which arise though and are reflected in communicative interaction.

Leech also suggests that language use involves a pragmalinguistic perspective.

One of the most influential models that tries to explain the impact of social factors on people´s use of language is Brown and Levinson´s face model of politeness. Brown and Levinson define face as the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself and they draw a distinction between positive face and negative face.

Positive face reflects every person´s need that his or her self-image is appreciated and approved of, and negative face reflects every person´s basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction- that is, to freedom of action and freedom from imposition.

Conversational Patterns and Structure

Conversation proceeds through ordered pairs of utterances, called adjacency pairs. The utterances in a pair are ordered, in that the first member of a pair requires a second member.

Conversation analysis is really an approach to discourse analysis; however, patterns such as insertion sequences may also be analyzed from a pragmatic perspective, in which case factors such as face are included to try and explain why such patterns occur. On the other hand, pragmatists working within other framework s, such as Sperber and Wilson´s cognitive-psychological approach, would argue that the patterns observed by conversation analysis follow from general principle of human cognition and communication.

The Role Context

Context plays a major role in the communication process, and so an important task for pragmatic theory is to elucidate this process. In social pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the following feature of the situational context have a particularly crucial influence on people´s use of language: the participant, the message content and the communicative activity.       

Context is sometimes taken to be concrete aspects of the environment in which an exchange takes place and that have a bearing on the communication process.

Pragmatics Research: Pragmatics and Methods

There are two broad approaches to pragmatics, a cognitive-psychological approach and a social-psychological approach. Cognitive pragmatics are primarily interested in exploring the relation between the decontextualized, linguistic meaning of utterance.

 Social pragmatics, on the other hand, tend to focus on the ways in which particular communicative exchanges between individuals are embedded in and constrained by social, cultural and other contextual factors.

The Importance of Context

Context is a crucial factor in pragmatic analysis. When designing language teaching materials and language learning activities, it is vital to clearly identify relevant contextual information such as the following: the roles, the number of people and what the communicative event is and what the goals are.

The Complexity of Meaning Construction

This process of construction meaning involves the use of all kinds of background knowledge, and so this means that the less background knowledge people have in common, the more difficult the process of communicating will be. This has major implications for foreign language teachers, both in terms of how they appraise the level of difficult of texts and also in terms of their own use of language.

The Impact of Speech Act Theory

It has a had a crucial impact on foreign language teaching, s it played a major role in the emergence of the functional perspective on language learning and teaching in the 1970s.

 Wilkins, in his analysis of the communicative meanings that language learners need to understand and express, described two types of meanings: national categories and functional categories. 

The Possibility (or Likelihood) of Pragmatic Transfer

 It is widely acknowledged that people´s use of a second language can be influenced by the characteristics of their first language.

Naturally, there can be pragmatics differences between languages, just as there can be phonological or syntactic differences. Some of these differences can be relatively grammatical.

During the last 20 years or so, pragmaticians have carried out contrastive research into many different pragmatic features in a very wide range of language. This area of research is known as cross-cultural pragmatics.


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A rich and Adaptable Instrument

The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an usually long History. Linguistics description becomes a matter of practical importance to a notion when it evolves a standard or official language.

The cultural dominance of Latin together with the supranational medieval world view made contemporary languages seem to be more vulgar local vernaculars unworthy of serious study; but England was already developing a recognized standard language by the eleven century.

Phonetic study in the modern senses was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912). Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German, Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs.

Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967), who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University Collage, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetic of French, was taken on a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points.

American linguistics, like many other aspects of American scholarship, was more influenced by German than by British practice.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R Firth (1980-1960). In 1938, Firth moved to the linguistics department of the school of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain.

The British Empire was to the London School what the American Indian was to American Descriptivists, in the sense that both group were inoculated by quantities of unfamiliar data against the arid apriorism that disfigures some Continental and most Chomskyan linguistics.

Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics, which we shall consider in that order. One of the principal features of Firth’s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystemic, to use Firth’s term.

The syllabic-nucleus system is simply different from the syllabic-margin system.

A firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of systems of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given from in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segment have been abstracted out as prosodies.

The syntactic hierarchical structure which they are widely recognized as possessing. Prosodic theory thus finds room naturally for such multi-segment units as the syllable, which has been a long-standing puzzles for both Descriptivists and generative phonologists.

Generative phonologists could capture the generalization about the similarity of vowels found in the same word by making frontness or backness, in the underlying from of any word, or only one of its vowels, say the first, and by writing a phonological rule saying in effect Make each vowel agree in frontness or backness with the first vowel of the word.

The firth´s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onwards. The most important aspect of Malinowski´s theorizing as distinct from his purely ethnographic work concerned the functioning of language.

The notion of describing a semantic system as an unseen network of relationships in speakers mind is suspect one. The notion that meaning is to be stated in terms of observables, allied to the fairly flexible concept of context, suggests two possible approaches to semantics, and Firth advocated both approaches at different point in his writings.

Insofar as scholars trained within the London School have contributed to our understanding of semantics, as John Lyons in particular has done, they have achieved this by going beyond the framework of ideas shred by other members of the school.

Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called systematic grammar. A system in Firthian language, remember, is a set of mutually exclusive options that come into play at some point in a linguistic structure. This is the clue to London School syntax: like Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choice which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentences out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one´s language makes available.

Chomskyan grammars include  constituency base defining a range of deep structures as well as a set of transformational rules converting deep into surface structures; but many Chomskyans evince far more interest in details of the traditional rules than in the details of the base, and some of the younger group of generative semantics seem to take the constituency base completely for granted, so that they discuss exclusively the rules for converting underlying structures into pronounceable form.

The psychologist wants a theory that describes languages, so that he can see what kinds of languages human beings are capable of using.

Systematic grammar is held to be more relevant than transformational grammar are literary criticism, and language teaching.       

FUCTION OF LANGUAGE

Activity

Functional Linguistic: The Prague School

We have seen that the impetus towards synchronic linguistics. A third impulse in the same direction came from Vilem Mathesius (1882-1945), Caroline University of Prague, Saussure´s lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911 when Mathesius published his first call for a new, non- historical approach to language study.

The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw the language in terms of function. This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivists.  Prague linguists looked at languages as one might look at motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. The practice of Prague School was not different from that of their contemporaries – they said the notions “phoneme” and “morpheme”.

One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius’s own work concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called “Functional Sentence Perspective”. Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of Functional Sentence Perspective was wholly unknown in American linguistics; some of the Descriptivists did use the terms “topic” and “comment” in much the same  way as Mathesius ‘s “theme” and “rheme”. But, apart from the fact that the Prague scholars developed these ideas rather further than any Americans ever did.

The modern Chomskyan School, however, lays great stress on the need for linguists´ statements to “explain” rather than merely “describe”, and it has no objection to the postulation of unobservables. A related point is that many Prague linguists were actively interested in questions of standardirizing linguistic usage. The American Descriptivists not only, quite rightly, drew a logical distinction between linguistic description and linguistic prescription, but furthermore left their followers in little doubt that prescription was an improper, unprofessional activity in which no respectable linguist would indulge.

The theory of theme and rheme by no means exhausts Mathesius’s contributions to the functional view of grammar; given more space.  Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the “Prague School”.  Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relation between phonemes, i.e. in the nature of the oppositions between the phonemes that potentially contrast with one another at a given point in a phonological structure, rather than in the syntagmatic relations which determine how phonemes may be organized into sequences in a language. Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: e.g. he distinguished between (i) privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic “mark” which the other lacks, (ii) gradual oppositions in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property, and (iii) equipollent oppositions, in which each member has a distinguishing mark lacking in the others. In some cases a given phonemic opposition will be suspended or “neutralized” in others. Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology –that is, a system which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has, rather than simply treating its phonological structure in the take-it-or –leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts.

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. The obvious function – that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart – he called the distinctive function, but this is by no means the only function that a phonological opposition may serve. Consider the opposition between presence and absence of stress, for instance: there are perhaps rather few languages in which this is a regularly distinctive. In languages with more variable stress position, such as English or Russian, stress has less delimitative function and scarcely any distinctive function, but it has a culminative function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few “clitics”. Thus Trubetzkoy points out that in German, while the opposition between /j/ and other consonant phonemes has a distinctive function /j/, also has a delimitative function in that this consonant occurs only morphemic-initially. Conversely English /ŋ// has a “negative delimitative function”: when we hear that sound we know that there cannot be a morpheme boundary immediately before it.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message. Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher colleague Karl Buhler, who distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker) and the conative function (that influencing the hearer).

Another manifestation of the Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job (or, rather, a wide variety of jobs) to do is the fact that members of that school were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use (Garvin 1964 provides an anthology of some of this work). Many American linguists, both Descriptivist’s and, even more so, those of the modern Chomskyan school, have by contrast maintained an almost puritanical  concentration on the formal, logical aspects of language to the exclusion of more humane considerations. This aspect of Prague School thought lies somewhat outside the purview of the present book. The Prague group constituted one of the few genuine points of contact between linguistics, and structuralism in the continental (nowadays mainly French) sense – a discipline whose contemporary practitioners often appeal to the precedent of linguistics in their approaches to literary criticism without, in many cases, really seeming to understand the linguistics concepts which they cite.

Bloomfieldians and Chomskyans disagree radically about the nature of science, but they are united in wanting to place linguistics firmly on the science side of the arts/science divide. The Prague School did not share this prejudice; they were not interested in questions of methodology, and it seems likely that, say, Mathesius in discussing the “characterology” of English would, if asked, have thought of his work as more akin to that of a physicist.

The therapeutic theory of sound-change. Mathesius, and following him various other members of the Prague School, had the notion that sound changes were to be explained as the result of a striving towards a sort of ideal balance or resolution of various conflicting pressures; for instance, the need for a language to have large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation, and at a more specific level the tendency in English.

The Prague School is in effect arguing that the atomicity which Saussure attributes to “diachronic” linguistics is not an intrinsic property of historical as opposed to synchronic linguistics but only of a particular school of linguists, who happened to be interested in historical rather than synchronic linguistics for reasons independent of their atomistic approach. The Prague School argues for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well as determining, synchronic état de langue.

One of the key concepts in Martinet’s account of sound-change is that of the functional yield of phonological oppositions. The functional yield of an opposition is, to put is simply, the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterance which are otherwise alike.

It is of course possible to defend the function-yield hypothesis by arguing that King and Wang have formalized the notion in an inappropriate way. But the onus is on proponents of the hypothesis to show this, and un any case there are phenomena in the history of the world’s language which seem so radically incompatible with Martinet’s hypothesis that no reformulation could conceivably avail against them.  In Chinese, morphemes and syllables are co-terminous, but modern Madarian has so few phonologically distinct syllables that on average each syllable is ambiguous as between three or four etymologically distinct morphemes in current use. A case such as English /faul/ would be unusual in Mandarian not because it permits alternative interpretations but because the number of alternatives is so small. The language has of course compensated for his loss of phonological distinctions. What has happened is that monomorphemic words have to a very large extent been replaced by compounds. But, unless we interpret Martinet as saying merely that a language will somehow maintain its usability as a means of communication, then Mandarian must surely refute him; the distinctions it has lost were of great functional yield. Mandarian strikingly vindicates Saussere’s view of the difference between diachronic and synchronic linguistics.

Perhaps this obituary for Martinet’s theory of sound-change is premature; one can think of ways in which some sort of rearguard action might be mounted in its defense.

The situation is rather different in the case of another theory evolved out of Prague School doctrines, namely Jakobson’s theory of phonological universals. Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle; in fact represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics. He has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature.

Speech sounds may be characterized in terms of a number of distinct and independent or quasi-independent parameters. Thus the height within the oral cavity of the highest point of the tongue is one articulatory parameter and the position of this point on the front/back scale is another parameter. Position of the soft palate is a third articulatory parameter. We may call the range of alternative choices provided by any parameter the values of that parameter.

One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters.

The system of cardinal vowels divides up these continua in a discrete fashion: thus it provides for just four equidistant degrees of vowel aperture. The Descriptivists emphasized that languages differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continous. Descriptivists tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a relatively “difficult” sound in any absolute sense.

Jakobson, on the hand, is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

If the Jakobsonian “distinctive features” were equated directly with ordinary articulatory parameters, Jakobson’s theory would be obviously false since many more than twelve articulatory parameters are exploited by the languages of the world. An important part of the theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are psychologically equivalent as one might say.

The Jakobsonian feature “fat” represents inter-changeably each of the following articulatory parameter-values: lip-rounding, pharyngalization and retroflex articulation.

The definition of “fat” implies that whereas some languages distinguish labialized and plain stops, others distinguish pharyngalized and plain stop, and others again distinguish retroflex from alveolar or dental stops.

The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appears in a book with Jakobson published in the period between leaving Czechoslovakia and arriving in American. He makes the point, to begin with, that a study of children’s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

Jakobson then goes on the argue that this hierarchy of phonological features, which is established on the basis of data about children´s acquisitions of language, manifests itself also in comparative studies of adult languages and in the symptoms of aphasia.

In order to substantiate his belief that the phonological universal he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects: that is, cases where perception in one sensory mode (in this case, speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (Jakobson considers mainly associations of sounds with colours).

The difficulty with this aspect of Jakobsno’s work is that his evidence is highly anecdotal- he bases his “universals”; and one anecdote is always very vulnerable to a counter-anecdote.

This anecdotal quality in Jakobson´s argumentation applies not merely to his statements about synaesthesia but more generally to his claims about the distinctive features.

One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “register”, or “style”, where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

The Prague scholars were particularly interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social setting. This aspect of their work has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov, formerly of Columbia University.

Labov´s work is based on recorded interviews with sizable samples of speakers o various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic from –a variable- which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

When we examine the age factor it emerges that historical changes is fuelled by social variation. Often, what a given speaker perceives as a difference between more and less socially prestigious styles of speech will coincide historically whit a different between newer and older usage, as speakers in each generation unconsciously modify their speech slightly in order to raise their social prestige.

Saussure stressed the social nature of language, and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because, for the speaker, the history of his language does not exist – a point that seemed undeniable. The Prague School and, now, Labov, are among the linguists who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously; and they have ended by destroying Saussure´s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.