Ethnography of Speech

The role of speech in human behavior has always been honored in anthropological principle, if sometimes slighted in practice. The importance of its study has been declaimed, surveyed with insightful detail, and accepted as a principle of field work.

Concept of Ethnography

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. Some anthropologists have seen language, and hence linguistics, as basic to a science of man because it provides a link between the biological and sociocultural levels. Some have seen in modern linguistic methodology a model or harbinger of a general methodology for studying the structure of human behavior.

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, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture.

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. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.

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.

The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities. 

Thus, “the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking.

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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.

In Chomsky's generative grammar framework, the syntax of natural language was described by a context-free rules combined with transformation rules. In later work (e.g. Chomsky 1981), the idea of formulating a grammar consisting of explicit rewrite rules was abandoned. In other generative frameworks, e.g. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et al. 1985), context-free grammars were taken to be the mechanism for the entire syntax, eliminating transformations.

—A formal grammar (sometimes simply called a grammar) is a set of formation rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. 

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics . Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas.
 

A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting must start. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator. However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a “recognizer"—a function in computing that determines whether a given string belongs to the language or is grammatically incorrect

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 (Givón 2001).

The formalist propositions regarding innateness and stimuli do fit extensively with the cognitive opposition
to behaviouristic psychology.

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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. 

Franz Boas

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. He was born in Minden, Germany, west of Hannover, and studied physics, geography, and geology at various universities, finishing his Ph.D. in Kiel in 1881. In the holistic tradition established by Franz Boas in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistic description focusing primarily on the languages and the peoples of northwestern U.S. and Canada.

Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896. Through his writing and teaching, Boas brought scientific rigor to linguistic description and helped demolish stereotypes about the languages that were then called `primitive.’ during this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association as an umbrella organization for the emerging field.

In his `Introduction' to the Handbook (1911), Boas provided an overview of the grammatical categories and linguistic units necessary for the analysis of American Indian languages and argued against overgeneralizations that would obscure differences across languages. He identified the sentence (as opposed to the word) as the unit for the expression of ideas, and listed a number of grammatical categories that are likely to be found in all languages, while pointing out that the material content of words (the meaning of lexical items) is language specific and that languages classify reality differently.

Edward Sapir

—Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline. —His linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Native Americans in southwestern Oregon. In 1909 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology, just emerging as a new field of study.

Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

—Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture. For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

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Grammatical Cases

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns.
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.
For example, Mary gave the apples is ungrammatical in this sense.

Grammatical Cases

Grammatical Forms

Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness.

Stable States

Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme.

Basic and Modified Meaning

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

Sentence Types

Order can imply (but is not exhausted by) position, which can be functional; a form alone is in absolute position, with another, in included position. Sentences relate through order, position, and, within a sentence, are distinguished by modulation, pratactic arrangement, and features of selection.
Languages show full and minor sentence types distinguished by taxemes of selection.

Words

Since the word is a free form, freedom of occurrence largely determines our attitude towards parts of a language. But even with our typographic conventions, we are inconsistent in distinguishing words and phrases, and in other languages, it is difficult to keep them apart.

Syntax

Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which noone of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.

Forms resultant from Free Forms

Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

Grammatical forms

The London School

Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century. Orthoepy- it is the codification and teaching the correct pronunciation. Lexicography- it is the invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages.’They induce in their practitioners a considerable degree of sophistication about matters linguistics.

Phonetics 

Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                            Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography.

Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound. He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

Linguistics

J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject. Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another. A phonemic transcription, represent a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. Firth´s theory allows for an unlimited variety of systems, the more distinct systems a given description recognizes the more complex that description will be.

A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.

The concept of the prosodic unit in phonology seems, so attractive and natural that it is surprising to find that it is not more widespread. In fact just one American Descriptivists, Zellig Harris, did use a similar notion; but Harris’s ‘long components’ though similar to Firth’s prosodies, are distinct and theoretically less attractive.

Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they are ussually taken to be.

Linguistics of the London School have done much more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.

Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentencesthat one’s language makes available.

The London School

The Copenhagen School

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The Copenhagen School

The Copenhage School

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. In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School. 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 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.

Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen – May 30, 1965, Copenhagen) 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 (with a.o.Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes). In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague.

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, and other important Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics.

žHis most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, or in English translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not systematising.

žHjelmslev's famously renamed signifier and signified as respectively expression plane and content plane. The combinations of the four would distinguish between form of content, form of expression, substance of content, and substance of expression.

Hjelmslev introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodome, and pleremeas linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme, etc. Also, his most famous work, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, is mostly concerned with the formal definition of a terminology for the analysis of any level of a system of signs, and as such there exists an exclusively Hjelmslevian terminology for that. In his general grammar, Hjelmslev tries to articulate the basic principles for a description of language as form. The grammar itself is a system of forms from which the specific forms of any natural language can be generated. 

Hjelmslev's importance in semiotics is a result of his rigorous attempt to turn Saussure's heterogenous and somewhat flexible structuralism into a theory of maximal explicitness and conceptual homogeneity on all levels. Moreover, his willingness to reconsider, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the formal limits of his theory sets the standard for any serious semiotic research.

The Prague School

The Prague School

Roman Jackobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University.

As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.
Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language).

Jakobson is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

Functions of Language

Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.

A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonetic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determinated by the phonemic

environment, often play an expressive or conative role. 

A manifestation of Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preocupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Functional Linguistcs: the Prague School

                             Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis           

established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s.

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.

The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.

Prague linguists, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were. Mathesius: theme and rheme. Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition: Distinctive function, delimitative function, culminative function.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include.

The Descriptivist´ approach to phonology might be described metaphorically as `democratic´.

The Descriptivists

The Descriptivists

Pragmatics

Pragmatics

The London School

Henry Sweet

Was the greatest of the few historical linguistics whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century. He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic  transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.

Daniel Jones

Stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

J.R. Firth

He turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain

Bronislaw Malinowski

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onward. He did fieldwork in the very primitive culture of the Trobriand Islands off eastern New Guinea. The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.

London School

Functional Linguistcs: the Prague School

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy
Was one of the members of the Prague School.  He developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic, he distinguished between privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic “mark”.
















André Martinet

One of the key concept was the sound change is that of the functional        

yield of a phonological opposition.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson

His approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, ordely, universal psychological system of sounds. 

William Labov

 His work is base in interviews of speakers in some speech community,

 being designed to elicit examples of some linguistics form, a variable,

 which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

The Prague School

Saussure: language as social fact

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, to give him his full name, was born in Geneva in 1857, son of a Huguenot family which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. Although nowadays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of "synchronic linguistics -the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject -in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.
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Chomsky

Chomsky's theories represented, and still represent, both a strong break with American structural linguistics, at the same time, a basic continuity with ideas traceable back to de Saussure and beyond. Chomsky retained the structuralist notion of language as an internally defined system, as well as the basic phrase-structure approach to syntactic analyses and the categorization of language units in traditional parts-of-speech units. In his book Syntactic structures (1957), Chomsky first outlined his theory, which he later solidified in Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965). In this second work, which became known as the "standard theory", Chomsky first devoted considerable time to the notions of competence and performance, arguing that the appropiate goal of linguistic research lies in explaining linguistic competence. Chomsky quickly recognized the limitations of early semantic-based approaches, and from the late 1960´s to the late 1970s, he argued for a theory of grammar that was first known as the "extended standard theory", and later as the "revised extended standard theory". In 1979 Chomsky departed from the revised extended standard theory in a series of lectures known as the Pisa lectures. The general theory to emerge became known as "government-and-binding" (GB) theory and was first presented in book form in Lectures on government and binding  (1981). Chomsky retained the notion of deep structure and transformations, though the set of transformational rules was reduced to one generally applicable rule named "move alpha".

The major difference from previous versions of Chomsky's theory lies in the superposition of a set general systems of principles that operate at deep-and surface-structure levels to determine the grammaticality of every sentence generated by the system. Chomsky outlines seven such systems of principles: government theory, binding theory, bounding theory, theta theory, case theory, control theory, and X-bar theory.

Growth of American Linguistics

The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropological linguistics arrived in North America to study and recorded native-American languages before many of those languages disappeared. The leading figure in this migration was Franz Boas, who first came to North America in the 1880's. Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading American structural linguists. It was Bloomfield, however, who has had the most immediate impact on American linguistics. He combined insights from anthropological linguitics with the then-pervasive views of behavioral psychology and with philosophical empiricism and positivism, to develop American Structural Linguistics. Psychological emphases appeared in the beliefs that the mind began language learning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that only what was observable could be used as evidence and that there could be developed a mechanical discovery procedure for doing linguistic research.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

The rapid growth of the field of applied linguistics over the last twenty years has led to a general observation that applied linguistics must be viewed as an interdisciplinary. Modern Linguistics necessarily begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course on linguistics. Sausure introduced distinctions such as synchronic vs diachronic (historical) analyses of language, and language vs parole. These latter two influential notions evolved from the structural assumptions on the nature of language. de Saussure's work had a powerful impact on various structural-linguistics groups that emerged across Europe, including the London School of Linguistics, the Geneva School of Linguistics, the Copenhagen School of Linguistics, and the Prague School of Linguistics. They also explored functional uses of language in sentences and discourse and had a significant impact on Chomsky's later theories through Roman Jakobson.  

 

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Before the nineteenth century, language in the western world was of interest mainly to philosophers. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. On the 27th September, 1786, an Englishman, Sir William Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities.