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. 

THE COPENHAGEN SCHOOL

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal.

The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "résumé of a theory of Language."

In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal.

Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. 

Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris

Hjelmslev published his first paper at the age of 25. 

His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses. He accepted language as a system of signs, from the point of view of language use.

Hjelmslev's sign model is a development of Saussure's bilateral sign model. Saussure considered a sign as having two sides, signifier and signified, and also distinguished between form and substance.

In one of his last works, “Some Reflexions on Practice and Theory in Structural Semantics” (1961), Hjelmslev even admits that the entire analysis might end up with indefinables of simple behavior situations such as, “I am here, you are there” elements that constitute language as a process of enunciation and not as an imminent structure.

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield is nowadays principal representative of the Descriptivist school. 

Leonard Bloomfield himself studied linguistics in the traditional style, spending a year in his twenties at Leipzing and Gottingen working with some of the great figures of the neogrammarian movement, and his teaching responsibilities at various Mid-Western universities were concerned with Germanic philology

Franz Boas

Franz Boas, began his academic career as a student of physics and geopraphy, and it was thought the latter subject that he came to anthropology. The key to Boas's thought lay in the realization, borne in to him on his first field trip, that, contrary to what he had supposed, anthropology is not a branch of geopraphy - that is to say, the culture of a community is not simply a function of its material circumstances, and the human sciences are quite distinct both in contect and in methods from physical sciences.

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.

"Descriptivist linguistics" is the term used for the school founded by Franz Boas.

'A rich and adaptable instrument'

Halliday

The London School

London School

Functions of Language

The ADDRESER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee; and finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connexion between the addresser and the addresse, enabling bothe of them to enter and stay in communication.

Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

Morphology

Linguistic research on morphology and on the organization of the lexicon has not initiated any great changes in practical research over the last 20 years.
Applied-linguistics research on lexicography, terminology development, second-language acquisition, and language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

Saussure:language as social fact

Saussure: language as social fact Activity

Applied Linguistics & Linguistics

Applied Linguistics Activity

The Study of Language

Plato distinguish noun and verbs. Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities.

Sir William Jones' discovery fired the imagination of scholars.

In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Ferdinand de Saussure is "the father of modern linguistic".  Saussure  suggesyede that language was like a game of chess, a system in wich each item is defined by its relationship to all the others. 'Structural linguistic' is sometimes misunderstood, all linguistics since de Saussure is structural, the language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements.

Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objetively and systematic observable data (Bloomfield era). Items were identified and classified solely on the basis of their distribution which the corpus.

Discovery procedures: set of principales which would enable a linguistic to 'discover' in a foolproof way the linguistics units of a unwitten language.

Chomsky is the most influencial  linguist od the century. He claimed tha a grammar should be more humans description of old  utterence. It should  also take into account posibble future utterence.