National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- 2.0 OBJECTIVES
- 3.0 MAIN CONTENT 3.1 Linguistic Anthropology Introduction
| 1.0 INTRODUCTION In this Unit, you shall be learning about a discipline that is central to your understanding of the whole idea of discourse analysis – Linguistic Anthropology. The field methods of Linguistic Anthropology are very useful for discourse analysts, because the latter place a lot of importance on context, as you earlier saw. The whole idea of analyzing discourse originated from Anthropologists, whose focus was not really on the language corpus but on how the society is structured through human interaction. We shall also take you through other notions related to Linguistic Anthropology, such as the concept of a speech community and Dell Hymes’ notion of Ethnography of Speaking. 2.0 OBJECTIVES By the end of this Unit, you should be able to do the following • Explain clearly what Linguistic Anthropology is all about. • Define the concept of Speech Community • Use Ethnography of Speaking to describe any particular speech situation • Explain the terms speech community and speech event 39 3.0 MAIN CONTENT 3.1 Linguistic Anthropology Introduction Linguistic Anthropology is a branch of Anthropology. The focus of the discipline is on how language is used in various social contexts. It focuses on speech both ancient and contemporary ones. Linguistic anthropologists are interested in how many languages there are, how those languages are distributed across the world, and their contemporary and historical relationships. It is also the study of the relationship between language and social relations. So, the concern of Linguistic Anthropology is the diachronic or historical, evolutionary, and internal structure of human languages in relation to the context. For instance, a linguistic anthropologist may decide to study the Etymology of names of places. This will require some historical data on the origin of those places. Linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field. It draws a great deal from other, independently established disciplines and in particular from the two from which its name is formed linguistics and anthropology. Linguistic anthropologists use traditional ethnographic methods such as participant-observation and work with native speakers to obtain local interpretive glosses of the communicative material they record. They also use elicitation techniques similar to those employed by typological linguists interested in grammatical patterns. Recently, these methods have been integrated with new forms of documentation of verbal practices developed in such fields as urban sociolinguistics discourse analysis, and conversation analysis. The advent of new technologies for the electronic recording of sounds and actions has broadened the range of phenomena that can be studied, increased our analytical sophistication, and, at the same time, multiplied the number of technical, political, and moral problems that a fieldworker must confront. As we enter this new technological era, it is imperative to develop a discursive arena in which to examine the pros and cons of the new tools within a general discussion of methodology for the study of human communicative behavior. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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