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