Antropologic Linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is more often considered to be a sub discipline of anthropology than linguistics and historically that is where it comes from. The primary concern of anthropologic linguistics was with the unwritten languages in America and their recording in order to preserve them in case the number of speakers started to decrease drastically. Moreover, the languages were seen as a vital part of culture so the knowledge of language was required to be able to completely understand the analyzed culture.

Anthropological linguistics deals with describing many languages and issues such as the influence of language on the behavior of the community that uses it. The well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a result of such investigations. According to this theory the language that people use has strong influence on the perception of the world. Therefore, anthropolinguists deal with problems such as how it happens that peoples sharing a culture might speak different languages and peoples who have different cultures sometimes share a language.

Also finding a systematic way of putting down previously unwritten languages in a way that would reflect all linguistic peculiarities and phonetic phenomena is the task of anthropologic linguists. Such undertakings not only lead to preserving endangered languages, but are also important from the point of view of culture. To find appropriate way of writing in a language that has only been spoken linguists seek the phonetic patterns. It is also important to provide a way of symbolizing speech sounds in such a way as to enable the native speakers to read it in order to verify if the linguists’ assumptions are correct. When this task is accomplished the analysis of morphemes begins and later on also of syntax.

 As anthropologic linguistics works on the assumption that communities’ cultures are reflected by language change it investigates synchronic and diachronic language change – that is it analyses various dialects and if it is possible the historical development. Moreover, the emergence and evolution of pidgins and creoles is also within the scope of interest of anthropologic linguistics. What is more, language acquisition in children is also studied by anthropolinguists, however, not the stages of language development are examined, but how the acquisition of linguistic abilities is perceived by the community. It turns out that in certain cultures parents do not interfere with the process, while in others caretakers put a lot of effort in teaching verbal etiquette.

Activity

http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-search/linguistic-anthropology/

Glossary American Structuralism

Syncategoramatic: Traditionally, a categorematic term is any term that stands alone, as a meaningful constituent of a proposition, while syncategorematic terms need others to make a meaningful unit.

Behaviorism: It has sometimes been said that “behave is what organisms do.” Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is to promote the scientific study of behavior.

Metalenguage:Language used in talking about language.

Mentalism: The belief that some mental phenomena cannot be explained by physical laws.

monistic: The doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being.

Philology: the study of human speech especially as the vehicle of literature and as a field of study that sheds light on cultural history.

Phoneme: any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language.

 Fasible goals: an aim or desired result possible to do easily or conveniently.

 Literary standard: is accessible through general or personal educational effort, transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal.

Colloquial standard: is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within a larger speech meaning.

 Provincial standard: is observed among those remote geographically from the formative environments of cultural centers.

Local dialect: is that of an interacting group with which others have so little contact that dialect speakers are incomprehensible without considerable attention. The occasions od difference are time, plus geographic and/or educational isolation.

 Contrasts: an obvious difference between two or more things.

Syntax:  the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence.

Lexicon: the vocabulary of a language, an individual speaker or group of speakers, or a subject.

Activity

http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/word-scramble/glossary-american-structuralism/

Antropological Linguistics

Ethnography: descriptive study of a particular human society. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork. The ethnographer lives among the people who are the subject of study for a year or more, learning the local language and participating in everyday life while striving to maintain a degree of objective detachment. He or she usually cultivates close relationships with “informants” who can provide specific information on aspects of cultural life. While detailed written notes are the mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers may also use tape recorders, cameras, or video recorders. Contemporary ethnographies have both influenced and been influenced by literary theory

Linguistic ethnography (LE): is a theoretical and methodological development orientating towards particular, established traditions but defining itself in the new intellectual climate of late modernity and post-structuralism.

The most representatives in linguistic ethnography are Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Franz Boas.
Sapir propuso una visión alternativa del lenguaje en 1921, afirmando que el lenguaje determina el pensamiento, de forma que cada lengua lleva aparejada una forma de pensar. La idea de Sapir fue adoptada y desarrollada durante los años 1940 por Whorf y finalmente se convirtió en la hipótesis de Sapir-Whorf.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/ethnography
http://www.uklef.net/linguisticethnography.html
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Sapir

Linguistic history

Activity

 

http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/hangman/linguistics-history/

Avram noam chomsky

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Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a US political theorist and activist, and institute professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides his work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics” and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928. His parents were Jewish. Her mother was part of the radical activism back in1930s. His uncle owned a newsstand that worked as an “ intellectual center”. For this we deduce where his critical thinking to politics came from. His father was an eminent scholar, who taught Hebrew.

Chomsky first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.

In 1957, Chomsky published a book called Syntactic Structures, book that started a revolution in linguistics. According to his transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to “deep structures,” a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., “John saw Mary”) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was seen by John”). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a “Minimalist Program” in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.

Some of his books are:

·         American Power and the new Mandarines

·         The Architecture of language

·         At war with Asia,

·         Aspects of theory of syntax

·         Barriers, Fail State: the abuse of Power and the abuse of Democracy.

Chomsky is reported, in recent surveys, to be the most cited of all living authors, ranking in fact with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

http://www.chomsky.info/bios.htm

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1825/18250040.htm

Activity

http://www.proprofs.com/games/jigsaw/chomsky/

Gramática de los casos: Fillmore y análisis del discurso

Gramática de los casos


Como teoría de análisis gramatical fue desarrollada a partir 1968 por el lingüista americano Charles J. Fillmore en el contexto de la Gramática transformacional.Nace para suplir las deficiencias de la gramática chomskiana en lo que concierne a significado. Según esta teoría, una predicación está constituida por un verbo que es combinado con uno o varios papeles temáticos, tales como el Agente, el Tema o el Instrumental. Estos papeles temáticos toman la forma de sintagmas nominales, y la distribución de estos viene dada por el caso gramatical que es una propiedad asignada a los SN de manera obligatoria, pues en caso de carecer de ella, la frase resultante no sería gramatical. La labor del caso es pues la de asignar una función gramatical específica a cada sintagma nominal.

Hace hincapié en las relaciones consistentes de significado en la estructura , lo que sintácticamente se define como sujeto en la estructura profunda, puede corresponder al caso “agente” o “instrumento” .

 

Carlos abre la puerta.

 

La llave abre la puerta.

Análisis del discurso

El análisis del discurso (o Estudios del discurso) es una transdisciplina de las ciencias humanas y sociales que estudia sistemáticamente el discurso escrito y hablado como una forma del uso de la lengua, como evento de comunicación y como interacción, en sus contextos cognitivos, sociales, políticos, históricos y culturales.

El primer lingüista moderno que comenzó el estudio de la relación de las condenas y acuñó el nombre de "analisis del discurso", que después se denota una rama de la lingüística aplicada, fue Zellig Harris. Su método consistía en utilizar un criterio de la distribución complementaria al igual que realiza el campo de la fonología, retoma a procedimientos de la lingüística descriptiva enfocándose también en las conexiones entre la situación social y el uso lingüístico. El Análisis del Discurso (AD) como disciplina independiente surgió en los años 1960 y 1970 en varias disciplinas y en varios países al mismo tiempo: la antropología, la lingüística, la filosofía, la poética, la sociología, la psicología cognitiva y social, la historia y las ciencias de la comunicación. El desarrollo del AD fue paralelo y relacionado con la emergencia de otras transdisciplinas, como la semiótica o semiología, la pragmática, la sociolingüística, la psicolingüística, la socioepistemología y la etnografía de la comunicación. En los últimos años el AD se ha hecho muy importante como aproximación cualitativa en las ciencias humanas y sociales.

Van Dijk (1992) sugiere que en todos los niveles del discurso podemos encontrar "huellas del contexto". Estas huellas o indicios permiten entrever características sociales de los participantes como por ejemplo sexo, clase, etnicidad, edad, origen, posición y otras formas de pertenencia grupal. Además, sostiene que los contextos sociales son cambiantes y como usuarios de una lengua seguimos pasivamente a los dictados de grupo, sociedad o cultura.

¿Cómo se empleará en mi carrera?
Dado que la carrera se trabaja con el lenguaje , ya sea el propio o el que se quiere traducir, es importante conocer ambas lenguas y el uso que tienen las palabras para poder saber cuando una oración es gramáticamente correcta o incorrecta, así como entender el papel del sujeto en ella, sobre todo en la lengua a traducir. También es importante conocer las implicaciones culturales que las palabras u oraciones tienen y la correcta conexión entre ellas.

¿Para qué me sirve? ¿ Para que me servirá en el futuro?

Para distiguir el papel que juega el sujeto en una oración. Para tener un mejor entendimiento de la lengua extranjera, en este caso el inglés. Estos conocimientos serán llevados a la práctica en mi profesión.   

Actividades

http://www.proprofs.com/games/crossword/gramtica-de-los-casos-y-anlisis-del-discurso/

Referencias

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram%C3%A1tica_de_casos

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/An%C3%A1lisis_del_discurso