FINAL ACTIVITY

Activity

ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEECH

That the study of speech might be crucial to a science of man has been a recurrent anthropological theme. Is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group, but revealing more of basic processes because more out of awareness, less subject to overlay by rationalization.

The Ethnography was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies and history.

Ethnography of communication or Speaking

The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography.

In the book Qualitative Communication Research Methods, explain "Ethnography of communication conceptualizes communication as a continuous flow of information, rather than as a segmented exchange of messages“.

EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or, what 

Gerry Philipsen (1975) calls a "speech community." Speech communities create and establish their own speaking codes/norms.  

GRAMMATICAL FORMS

Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities: given any A, B pair, however defined, the presence or absence of a value for each, however defined, can be calculated. With values of + or –.

THE FORMALISM BASED ON NOAM CHOMSKY

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars).

A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study. 

Parsing is the process of recognizing an utterance (a string in natural languages) by breaking it down to a set of symbols and analyzing each one against the grammar of the language. Most languages have the meanings of their utterances structured according to their syntax—a practice known as compositional semantics.

The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate universal grammar (UG), and a disregard for the role of stimuli. According to this position, language use is only relevant in triggering the innate structures. With regard to the tradition, Chomsky’s position can be characterized as a continuation of essential principles of structuralist theory from Saussure. 

GRAMMATICAL CASES

Charles J. Fillmore is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).

He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires. The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) -- Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument -- which are required by a specific verb.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

It is concerned with: Descriptive (synchronic) linguistics, Historical (diachronic) linguistics, Ethnolinguistics and Sociolinguistics.

THE LONDON SCHOOL

Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century. In the sixteenth century the practical linguistic was flourished in England.

School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)

It was founded in 1916. London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.