NO ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS ***FRIDAY, SEPT 13 th***

1. NO ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS***FRIDAY, SEPT 13th*** (All 100- and 200-level classes between 10 and 11 are cancelled for orientation) ***FRIDAY, OCT 4th***

2. Language and Communication II Descriptive Linguistics Historical LinguisticsSociolinguistics

3. Descriptive Linguistics • Meaningful sounds and sound sequences are combined according to rules often not consciously known by the speakers • Phonology, morphology and syntax

4. Phonology • Phonology: Study of a language’s sound system • Phones: Different sounds that the human vocal tract can make • No single language uses all possible sounds or phones • Transcribed using phonemic alphabet • Phoneme: minimal unit of sound that signals a difference in meaning • Example: LAKE and RAKE

5. Morphology • Morphology: study of sequences of sounds that have meaning (word formation) • Morpheme: Smallest unit in a language with meaning (such as prefixes, suffixes, root words) • Morpheme: One or more morphs with the same meaning • Freemorphemes stand alone: Toast, Giraffe • Bounded morphemes have no meaning except when attached to morpheme: Toast + er= Toaster; Giraffe + s = Giraffes

6. Syntax • Patterning of phrases and sentences • Along with morphology, makes up grammar

7. Historical Linguistics • Study of how languages change over time • Goals: • Reconstruct features of ancestral languages (proto-languages) of modern languages • Hypothesize how offspring languages separated from proto-language • Language family: All languages derived from same proto-language • Establish approximate dates of separation

9. “I saw Uncle Bob on 42nd Street.” • Mian: the verb would reveal if the event happened just now, yesterday, or the distant past • Indonesian: verb wouldn’t indicate whether it had happened or was coming up soon • Russian: verb would reveal speaker’s gender • Mandarin: would specify if uncle was maternal or paternal and by blood or marriage • Pirahã: could not specify “42nd” because no words for exact quantities – “few” “many” etc.

10. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis • Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf • Language affects how individuals perceive and conceive reality

11. Gender Identity Formation for Hebrew, Finnish, & English speakers • 1983 - Alexander Guiora- University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: Do children develop gender identity earlier when their language emphasizes gender? • Compared three groups of kids growing up with Hebrew, English or Finnish as their native language • Hebrew: All nouns masculine or feminine, even second-person and plural pronouns • English: Differentiates gender only in third-person singular • Finnish: Words such as man and woman convey gender, but differentiation of gender is otherwise lacking • Children growing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children; English-speaking kids fall in the middle

12. Explaining Directions in Pormpuraaw • Pormpuraaw - a remote Aboriginal community in Australia • Everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), instead of “right” or “left” • Example: Instead of “There is a • About a third of the world's languages rely on absolute directions for space - Speakers are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are even in unfamiliar landscapes • They perform navigational feats once thought were beyond human capabilities

13. Sociolinguistics • Study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speech variation in different social contexts • Honorifics and social status • Gender differences • Multilingualism and Codeswitching

14. Examples of Gender Speech Differences • Entirely different words to describe the same concept • Example- Japan: WATER – Men: mizu; women: ohiya • Differences in intonation and phrasing • Example- USA: