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Linguistic statistics based on the full quantile regression process. Hyndman R J, Bashtannyk D M, Grunwald G K 1996 Es- There have been several proposals dealing with gener- timating and visualizing conditional densities. Journal of alizations of quantile regression to nonparametric Computational. and Graphical Statistics 5: 315–36 response functions involving both local polynomial Koenker R, Bassett G 1978 regression quantiles. Econometrica 46: 33–50 methods and splines. Extension of quantile regression Koenker R, Hallock K 2001 Quantile Regression. Journal of methods to multivariate response models is a par- Economic, PerspectiŠes, forthcoming ticularly important challenge. Lehmann E 1974 Nonparametrics: Statistical Methods Based on Ranks. Holden-Day, San Francisco Manski C 1985 Semiparametric of discrete response: 7. Conclusion asymptotic properties of the maximum score estimator. Journal of Econometrics 27: 313–34 Classical least squares regression may be viewed as a Portnoy S, Koenker R 1997 The Gaussian hare and the natural way of extending the idea of estimating an Laplacian tortoise: computability of squared-error vs. unconditional mean parameter to the problem of absolute-error estimators, with discussion. Statistical Science estimating conditional mean ‘functions,’ the crucial 12: 279–300 step is the formulation of an optimization problem Powell J L 1986 Censored regression quantiles. Journal of Econometrics 32 that encompasses both problems. Likewise, quantile : 143–55 regression offers an extension of univariate quantile R. Koenker estimation to estimation of conditional quantile func- tions via an optimization of a piecewise linear objective function in the residuals. Median regression minimizes the sum of absolute residuals, an idea introduced by Boscovich in the eighteenth century. The asymptotic theory of quantile regression closely parallels the theory of the univariate sample quantiles; computation of quantile regression estimators may be ‘Linguistic anthropology’ is an interdisciplinary field formulated as a linear programming problem and dedicated to the study of as a cultural efficiently solved by simplex or barrier methods. A resource and speaking as a cultural practice. It assumes close link to rank based inference has been forged that the human language faculty is a cognitive and a from the theory of the dual regression quantile process, social achievement that provides the intellectual tools or regression rankscore process. for thinking and acting in the world. Its study must be Recent nontechnical introductions to quantile re- done by detailed documentation of what speakers say gression are provided by Buchinsky (1998) and as they engage in daily social activities. This docu- Koenker and Hallock (2001). Most of the major mentation relies on and other statistical computing now include some methods, including audiovisual recording, annotated capabilities for quantile regression estimation and transcription, and interviews with participants. inference. Quantile regression packages are available As an interdisciplinary field, linguistic anthropology for R and Splus from the R archives at http:\\ has often drawn from and participated in the de- lib.stat.cmu.edu\R\CRAN and Statlib at http:\\ velopment of other theoretical . Some of its lib.stat.cmu.edu\S, respectively. Stata’s central core own is reflected in the oscillation often found provides quantile regression estimation and inference among a number of terms that are not always functions. SAS offers some, rather limited, facilities synonyms: linguistic anthropology, anthropological for quantile regression. , , and . Its main areas of interest have changed over the years, from an almost exclusive interest in the documentation Bibliography of the of aboriginal languages to the Barrodale I, Roberts F D K 1974 Solution of an overdetermined analysis of the uses of talk in everyday interaction and throughout the life span (Duranti 1997, Foley 1997). of equations in the l" norm. ACM 17: 319–20 This article provides a brief historical account of Buchinsky M 1998 Recent advances in quantile regression linguistic anthropology, and highlights important models: a practical guide for empirical research. Journal of and present issues, theories, and methods. Human Resources 33: 88–126 Doksum K 1974 Empirical probability plots and statistical inference for nonlinear models in the two sample case. Annals of Statistics 2: 267–77 1. Linguistic Anthropology within the Boasian Gutenbrunner C, Jurec) kova! J 1992 Regression quantile and Tradition regression rank score process in the linear model and derived statistics. Annals of Statistics 20: 305–30 In the holistic tradition established by Ha! jek J, Sida! k Z 1967 Theory of Rank Tests. Academia, Prague, (1858–1942) in the USA at the beginning of the Czech Republic twentieth century, anthropology was conceived as

8899 Linguistic Anthropology comprising four subfields: , physical (now later became known as ‘salvage anthropology,’ that is ‘biological’) anthropology, linguistics (now ‘linguistic the documentation of languages and cultural tra- anthropology’), and (now ‘sociocultural ditions that seemed on the verge of disappearing. This anthropology’). This vision of anthropology differs enterprise—a struggle against time due to the great from the one found in the European tradition, where damage already done, by the end of the nineteenth linguistics and remained rigidly century, to the indigenous of the Americas by separate disciplines for most of the twentieth century, European colonizers—produced valuable information despite the emphasis on the use of native languages in on Native American traditions, but it had its method- fieldwork among UK , and the theor- ological and theoretical drawbacks, the most flagrant etical and methodological influence of Bronislaw of which was the inability to see or accept the effects of Malinowski (1884–1942), who wrote about the im- cultural contact and colonization. portance of linguistic research for an anthropological Through his writing and teaching, Boas brought understanding of human . In the 1950s, the scientific rigor to and helped adoption of the term ‘ethnolinguistics’ (reflecting the demolish a number of unfounded stereotypes about European preference for ‘ethnology’ over ‘(cultural) the languages that were then called ‘primitive.’ In an anthropology’) for those studies that merged linguistic 1889 article entitled ‘On alternating sounds,’ Boas and anthropological interests signaled the intellectual argued that the commonly held view that speakers of recognition, at least in some European academic American Indian languages were less accurate in their circles, of the importance of an ‘ethnological side’ of pronunciation than speakers of Indo-European linguistic studies (Cardona 1976), but the institutional languages was false and probably due to the lack of recognition of such a discipline within European linguistic sophistication of those who had first tried anthropology has been slow to come. European to describe indigenous languages. Consistent with his scholars with research interests similar to those of , Boas believed that each language North American linguistic anthropologists are thus should be studied on its own terms rather than more likely to be found in departments of linguistics, according to some preset categories based on the study foreign languages and , , communi- of other, genetically unrelated languages (e.g., ). cation, , or . In his ‘Introduction’ to the Handbook (1911), Boas To understand the special role given to the study of provided an overview of the grammatical categories languages in the Boasian tradition, we must go back to and linguistic units necessary for the analysis of the time when anthropology became a profession in American Indian languages and argued against over- the USA, in the period between the last decades of the generalizations that would obscure differences across nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth languages. He identified the (as opposed to century. In that time, the study of American Indian the ) as the unit for the expression of ideas, and languages emerged as an essential part of anthro- listed a number of grammatical categories that are pological research. (1834–1902), likely to be found in all languages, while pointing out the founder of the Bureau of Ethnology, later renamed that the material content of (the of Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), supported, lexical items) is language-specific and that languages through grants from the US government, linguistic classify reality differently. One language might express fieldwork, in the belief that by collecting the semantic connections among words pertaining to and texts from American Indian languages, it would the same semantic field by modifying one basic stem, be possible to reconstruct their genetic relations and whereas another language might have words that are thus help in the classification of American Indian etymologically completely unrelated. As examples of . Boas himself had become fascinated by the the latter type, Boas (1911) mentioned the different grammatical structures of Chinook and other words that are used in English for centered languages of the American northwest coast early on in around the idea of ‘water’—‘lake,’ ‘river,’ ‘brook,’ his fieldwork, and seized the opportunity to work for ‘rain,’ ‘dew,’ ‘wave,’ ‘foam’—and four different words the BAE and edit the Handbook of American Indian for concepts based on ‘snow’ in Eskimo. These Languages (1911). examples were later taken out of and the Although Boas, a diffusionist, was quite skeptical of number of words for ‘snow’ in Eskimo (languages) the possibility of using languages for reconstructing grew larger and larger over the next decades in both genetic relations between tribes—and was against any academic and popular publications. correlation between language and race—he tried to It was (1884–1939) who, more than transmit to his students a passion for the details of any other of Boas’s students, further developed Boas’s linguistic description and the conviction that interest in grammatical systems and their potential languages were an important tool for (a) fieldwork, implications for the study of , and trained a new and (b) the study of culture, especially because the generation of experts of American Indian languages categories and rules of language are largely uncon- (e.g., , , Benjamin Lee scious and thus not to secondary rational- Whorf, Carl Voegelin). Unlike Boas, however, Sapir izations. Furthermore, Boas was committed to what was not a four-field . He wrote and

8900 Linguistic Anthropology lectured on culture and personality, but had no interest cultural relativism, if not a corollary of it. It was in archaeology or physical anthropology, which he accompanied by a concern for the proper repre- saw as being more appropriately housed in museums sentation of grammatical systems that could not be than in anthropology departments. Furthermore, described using the categories of European languages. whereas Boas was skeptical of genetic reconstruction Third, the same antiracist attitude that characterized and tended to favor acculturation as a cause of Boas’s views on human diversity seemed to motivate similarities between languages, Sapir was a strong the lack of judgment associated with linguistic believer in the power of the , diversity. which he used to reconstruct Proto-Athabascan For Sapir, was a way of articu- and posit the Na-De! ne! linguistic group (comprising lating what he saw as the struggle between the Athabascan, , and Haida). individual and (Mandelbaum 1949). In order While he was at Yale, Sapir encouraged his students to communicate their unique experiences, individuals to go into linguistics rather than anthropology, and it need to rely on a public over which they have is no accident that they ended up calling themselves little control. Linguistic rules are usually unconscious, ‘anthropological linguists.’ They thought of them- and it is difficult for individual speakers to enter the selves primarily as linguists, as demonstrated by their logic of the linguistic system and alter it to their liking. dedication to the study of the grammatical structures In this perspective, linguistic relativity becomes a way of American Indian languages (and other previously of exploring the power that words have over indi- undocumented languages). Their emphasis on field- viduals and groups. It is thus a precursor to more work and their preference for historical and descriptive recent topics in linguistic anthropology, such as linguistics kept them separate from the new linguistics language (see Sect. 4.3). of the 1960s, Chomsky’s generative . To Sapir never developed the conceptual framework or anthropological linguists such as Mary Haas the methodology for testing the implications of these advent of this new was a threat because (a) intuitions about the language faculty. This task was it seemed more committed to linguistic theory than to left to another important figure in the history of languages, and in fact devalued grammatical descrip- linguistic anthropology, (1897– tion per se; (b) it was (especially at the beginning) 1941), a chemical engineer who worked as an insurance almost exclusively based on English—Chomsky ar- inspector, taught himself linguistics, and after 1931 gued that one could posit universals of language by entered into contact with Sapir and his students at working on one language; and (c) it predicated the Yale. Although Whorf started out sharing several of need for linguists to work on their own intuitions the basic positions held by Boas and Sapir on the instead of working with native speakers or inferring nature of linguistic classification, he developed his grammatical rules on the basis of a corpus of elicited own conceptual framework, which included the texts (Haas 1987). This last point was particularly distinction between oŠert and coŠert grammatical problematic for those students of Native American categories, and an important analytical tool for languages who often had only one or two old speakers understanding what kinds of categorical distinctions to work with and could not find younger speakers to speakers are sensitive to—this issue was later further train in linguistic theory and methods. developed in the work on (Whorf 1956). Contrary to popular belief, Whorf was not so much concerned with the number of words for the same referent (e.g., ‘snow’) in different languages, but 1.1 Linguistic RelatiŠity in the History of Linguistic with the implications that different grammatical sys- Anthropology tems and have for the way in which speakers Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to make inferences about the world. He believed that various hypotheses or positions about the relationship ways of thinking may develop by analogy with between language and culture (see Sapir–Whorf Hy- ‘fashions of speaking,’ a that was later revived pothesis). Although Sapir and Whorf differed in their by Hymes’s notion of ‘ways of speaking.’ discussion of the relationship between language and Whorf’s work was harshly criticized in the 1960s culture, and never produced a joint formulation of and 1970s, especially after the publication of Berlin what is meant by linguistic relativity, there is no and Kay’s (1969) study of color terminology, in which question that the themes and issues often identified as they claimed that lexical labels for basic color terms linguistic relativity are the continuation of the Boasian are not arbitrary but follow universal principles. But paradigm. First, Sapir and Whorf followed Boas’s more recent studies have given support to some of intellectual curiosity for the indigenous languages of Whorf’s ideas (Lucy 1992), and even the universality North America as a way of channeling a more general of basic color terminology and its innate perceptual fascination for alternative ways of being in the world saliency have been questioned (e.g., Levinson 2000). and the desire to make sense of those ways. Second, to Sapir and Whorf’s ideas about the unconscious aspects the extent to which it started from an emphasis on of linguistic codes continued to play an important part human diversity, linguistic relativity was related to in the history of linguistic anthropology, and re-

8901 Linguistic Anthropology appeared in the 1980s in the context of a number of Chomsky’s notion of ideal speaker-hearer was prob- research projects, including the study of language lematic for many reasons, including the fact that not (Kroskrity 2000). all members of a community have access to the same verbal resources or the same opportunities to use them. In his writings, Hymes shifted the focus from 2. Linguistic Anthropology in the 1960s to linguistic diversity. This change had methodological implications. From elicit- In the same years in which Chomsky’s generative ing grammatical patterns and speech genres (e.g., grammar was becoming popular in the USA, two , traditional stories, proverbs, riddles) from other important programs were also launched: the native speakers, linguistic anthropologists shifted their of and urban socio- attention to the actual use of language in social linguistics (see Sociolinguistics). interaction. Gumperz and Hymes’s students went to Through his own qualitatively oriented work and the field with the goal of studying how language was his collaboration with Charles Ferguson on multi- being used in different events (e.g., ceremonies, village lingualism in South Asia, John Gumperz criticized the councils, classrooms) and different places (e.g., at a notion of ‘language’ as used by linguists, and intro- street corner, market, dinner table). Linguistic per- duced the notions of , repertoire, and linguistic formance—the use of language (or its significant community or . In the same years, absence)—became the starting point of any investi- launched a call for a comparative study of gation (Bauman and Sherzer 1974). communicative events to capture the ways in which Hymes and others reconceptualized performance as speaking is a cultural activity and should be studied as a realm of social action, which emerges out of the such. His collaboration with Gumperz produced a interaction with other speakers and as such is not new paradigm in linguistic anthropology, one in which reducible to the use of the linguistic knowledge researchers were expected to study both knowledge controlled by one individual. The focus on perform- and use of languages through ethnographic methods ance allowed fieldworkers to recognize the creative (Gumperz and Hymes 1964). The of inquiry dimensions of any act of speaking, the role of was no longer the grammars of indigenous languages, individuals and groups in the reproduction and trans- but communicative events and contextual formation of linguistic codes and the institutions they within and across speech communities. Although support, the responsibility associated with any display Hymes stressed the need to see linguistics as part of of one’s verbal skills, and the interactive construction anthropology, and insisted on the ‘linguistic of messages and meanings. anthropology’ over ‘anthropological linguistics,’ he also helped defined a domain of inquiry that was in many ways independent of both linguistics and the 3. Context other subdisciplines within anthropology. Whether In an ethnographic approach, language is seen as intended or not, this effort resulted in a type of permeable to social situations and social roles while at linguistic anthropology that was much less pre- the same time helping to define those situations and occupied with grammatical description and linguistic roles. This means that linguistic anthropologists need reconstruction than the one practiced by the previous analytical tools and units of analysis to define the generations, and more focused on the performance of context of speech. With this goal in mind, in the late language and consequently its aesthetic and political 1960s Hymes expanded Jakobson’s model of the dimensions. This emphasis on the actual use of speech event, and proposed the ‘SPEAKING Model,’ language allowed for great progress in the under- with each letter of the word ‘speaking’ standing for a standing of the cultural organization of speaking, but cluster of dimensions of speech events that ethno- left scholars in other fields worrying about linguistic graphers of communication should explore: Situation, issues that were still central to anthropology, such as Participants, Ends, Act Sequences, Key, Instrumental- language . While Chomsky was leading an ities, Norms, and Genre (Hymes 1967 reprinted in antibehavioristic ‘cognitive revolution,’ Gumperz and Hymes 1974). This list was meant to provide an etic Hymes were trying to develop a paradigm in which grid for comparative purposes, and although it was language behavior could be fully explored as social rarely used in its entirety or formally adopted by activity. In this perspective, the notion of communi- Š researchers, it helped many to identify dimensions of cative competence was central (see Communicati e verbal communication that had been left out of Competence: Linguistic Aspects). previous investigations. In the meantime, Gumperz refined his analysis of multilingualism and , and became interested in the analysis of face- 2.1 From CommunicatiŠe Competence to to-face interaction. He expanded the concept of Performance linguistic repertoire to include the range of resources The documentation of variation and the observation that speaker-hearers use to make inferences about the of the social life of speech had taught fieldworkers that ongoing context. This line of inquiry resulted in the

8902 Linguistic Anthropology notion of contextualization cues, linguistic features Anthony Giddens, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, through which ‘speakers signal and listeners interpret Clifford Geertz, Paul Ricoeur); (c) the use of the what the activity is, how semantic content is to be concept of ideology in trying to understand how understood and how each sentence relates to what speakers conceptualize what constitutes appropriate precedes or follows’ (Gumperz 1982, p. 131). Typical and interpretable language; and (d) the introduction examples of contextualization cues are intonational and wider adoption of new recording technologies patterns, paralinguistic features (e.g., tempo, pausing), (e.g., video, digitized images), and their implications choice of code (e.g., English vs. Spanish), use of key for the definition of what constitutes an empirically words, and formulaic expressions. They can be studied adequate representation of speaking or, more broadly, in order to make sense of both successful and communication. unsuccessful communication—‘crosstalk’ was the name with which miscommunication between people with different cultural backgrounds came to be known 4. New Trends (thanks especially to a BBC program centered around Gumperz’s research on South Asian speakers of The last two decades have seen the development of English in the UK). several new projects involving the interface between In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the notion of language and other cultural resources. Three of the context was also being revisited by a number of other most important ones are language , multi- researchers within linguistic anthropology. Michael lingualism, and the study of the linguistic dimensions Silverstein (1976) proposed a model of of power and control. that could be adapted to the sociocultural study of language in and as context. He identified linguistic along a continuum from highly presupposing 4.1 Language Socialization (i.e., they can be interpreted only on the basis of an existential connection with some independently es- Although the acquisition of communicative com- tablished aspect of context) to highly creative (i.e., petence was always meant to be an important part of constitutive of their own context). Deictic terms like the program in the ethnography of communication, ‘this’ in ‘this room is cold’ are presupposing because it the field of language socialization did not fully develop is assumed that the room must exist for the utterance until the mid-1980s, when Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. to be interpretable, whereas second-person pronouns Schieffelin (1984) defined it as (a) the process of getting (e.g., ‘you’ in English, tu in Spanish) are creative, given socialized through language and (b) the process of that they establish the identity of the addressee\ getting socialized to language, and offered some recipient while simultaneously creating the role of specific directions for research. By applying an an- addressee\recipient in the ongoing speech event. thropological reading to prior work on language Languages that have socially differentiated second- acquisition, they reframed it as embedded in culturally person pronouns (e.g., the classic T\V type of dis- specific expectations about the role of children and tinction of many European languages, French tu\Šous, adults in Western societies and, particularly, in white Spanish tu\Usted, German du\Sie, and Italian tu\Voi middle- families. Using their discovery that or tu\Lei) are more extreme examples of systems in neither one of the two speech communities they had which words are used to activate or establish the studied (i.e., in and in Samoa) relevant social coordinates of equality\inequality, have a register corresponding to what is known as solidarity\power. The study of indexicality has be- ‘baby talk’ or ‘motherese,’ Ochs and Schieffelin not come a major focus of interest in contemporary only demonstrated that simplification in talking to linguistic anthropology, and has been accompanied by infants, contrary to what was suggested by some a renewed interest in the role of the human body in the linguists and psycholinguists, is not universal, but establishment of the referential grounding of most also, and more importantly, that simplification in communicative acts (Hanks 1990). talking to infants correlates with other forms of A more recent effort toward the definition of context accommodation to children, and local conceptual- is Elinor Ochs’s (1996) model for the construction of izations of children and their place in society. social identities, which is based on a number of Although related to child situational dimensions established through language studies, language socialization studies examine the use: social acts, activities (a sequence of two or more cultural implications of what is being done with, to, acts), and affective and epistemic stances. around, and through talk to children, with the theor- The 1990s saw a rethinking of the concept of context etical assumption that learning is a two-way street, in part due to: (a) a renewed awareness of the role of and that both experts and novices may come out of theory and methodology in defining the difference routine social encounters with new ways of thinking, between the message and its context (Duranti and acting, and feeling. Goodwin 1992); (b) the influence of a number of Language socialization is conceptualized as a never- theorists from other disciplines (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, ending process because speakers never stop learning

8903 Linguistic Anthropology new ways of using language, for example in school, at based on rational principles used to mitigate ‘face work, in church, at play. Among the various forms of threatening acts.’ (see Politeness and Language). In ‘secondary socialization,’ literacy has occupied an this theory, language plays a crucial role in mediating important role in linguistic anthropology. The work of differences in power between speakers. Shirley Brice Heath (1983) has been very influential in Other approaches have stressed the lack of control showing the benefits of an ethnographic study of that speakers have over their linguistic resources. For literacy practices in the home, where children are example, the analysis of traditional oratory by exposed to literacy in ways that may or may not be Maurice Bloch defined it as a coercing system within precursors of the type of activities they will encounter which speakers could only reproduce the existing in school. power relations. Earlier work on language and also uncovered some of the implications in linguistic codes and linguistic routines that are responsible for 4.2 Multilingualism: New PerspectiŠes on Contact defining female speakers not only as different, but as and Change weak, unassertive, or submissive (see ). More recent work has questioned some of In the 1980s the writings of Mikhael Bakhtin (and one these findings, at least as generalized statements about of his alter egos, Valentin Voloshinov) were par- women, and stressed the importance of careful analysis ticularly influential for their conceptualization of of face-to-face encounters. Marjorie H. Goodwin meaning as a joint activity, the attention given to (1990) found the girls in her study as assertive and coexisting styles and voices within the same ‘text,’ and confrontational as boys. But she also discovered that the identification of both centripetal (toward unity there were some differences in the interactional stra- and standardization) and centrifugal forces (away tegies used by boys and girls. Among girls, offenses from unity and standardization) in language use. The were constructed out of reported deeds, and especially notion of a unitary language then becomes both reported speech, by absent parties (in the so-called empirically and ideologically suspect because it hides ‘he-said-she-said’ sequences). from us the inequality inherent in any linguistic As researchers improve their understanding of the system, as well as the potential and actual aesthetic subtle functioning of different language varieties (e.g., effects of the juxtaposition of multiple voices and codes, , registers, genres, styles) in the defin- coexisting language varieties. Bakhtin’s work inspired ition of social identities (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity), a number of linguistic anthropologists including Jane they unveil the active roles that speakers play in and Kenneth Hill (1986), who introduced the notion adapting existing linguistic resources to their inter- of syncretic language to describe the mixing of actional goals, and their ability simultaneously to grammars that takes place in contemporary Mexicano index multiple social worlds and their associated () (see Code Switching: Linguistic). Even when identities (Hall and Bucholtz 1995, Zentella 1997). speakers are no longer considered bilingual, some The power of new technologies in the definition of aspects of their ‘lost’ language and its cultural contexts persons and their rights was a central theme of Michel are maintained, sometimes in occasional code switches Foucault’s historical analysis of the development of and in a variety of other hybrid constructions. It is the asylums and other institutions that dealt with health in task of the researcher to find out what survives of the . In a similar vein, but using detailed analysis of old code and under what conditions it reappears in face-to-face encounters in which participants com- spoken or written discourse. Communities differ in the municate through talk, gestures, and the use of extent to which they recognize the presence of alter- material artifacts, Charles Goodwin (1994) identified native ways of speaking. Ideological positions based a series of interpretive procedures (e.g., ‘coding,’ on linguistic purism, enforcement of national identity, ‘highlighting’) which use particular types of inscription and control over ethnic boundaries play an important techniques to constitute what he calls ‘professional role in the types of language varieties that are vision.’ supported or oppressed (Schieffelin et al. 1998). 5. Methods 4.3 Power and Control In the last few decades of the twentieth century, there The study of speaking as a cultural practice cannot be was considerable improvement in the tools used in made without encountering the issue of how language documenting language use. Whereas descriptions of can be used to control the action of others. A number verbal activities such as greetings, proverbs, insults, of contributions within linguistic anthropology have and speechmaking used to be based on participant dealt with this issue. observation or on work with native speakers, today Building on Goffman’s notion of ‘face work’ and researchers are expected to have recordings of ex- Grice’s conversational maxims, Penelope Brown and changes in which the phenomena they describe are Stephen Levinson (1987, first published in 1978) occurring spontaneously. As the technology for visual presented a theory of politeness as a set of strategies documentation improves and becomes more access-

8904 Linguistic Anthropology ible, we are able to notice phenomena (e.g., synchron- See also: Anthropology, History of; Area and Inter- ization between talk and gestures) which used to be national Studies: Linguistics; Boas, Franz missed in past analysis of verbal communication. At (1858–1942); Discourse, Anthropology of; Ethno- the same time, audiovisual documentation has also graphy; Ethnology; Foucault, Michel (1926–84); increased the level of intrusion into people’s lives. This : Overview; Linguistic Field- means that researchers must be ever more aware of the work; Linguistics: Overview; Malinowski, Bronislaw social and ethical dimensions of fieldwork. The re- (1884–1942); Sapir, Edward (1884–1939); Sapir– lationship between researchers and their subjects is as Whorf Hypothesis; Sociolinguistics delicate and as important as any other human re- lationship and as such requires care, mutual respect, and honesty. If the goal of our study is a better understanding of the role played by language in the Bibliography human condition, we must be guided in our efforts by Bauman R, Sherzer J 1974 Explorations in the Ethnography of the desire to improve our communication across social Speaking. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and cultural boundaries. This must also apply to our Berlin B, Kay P 1969 Basic Color Terms: Their UniŠersality and fieldwork situation and our relationship with the EŠolution. University of Press, Berkeley, CA speech communities we want to study. Boas F 1911 Introduction. In: Boas F (ed.) Handbook of Fieldworkers’ participation in the social life of the American Indian Languages. and Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC, Vol. BAE- community must be recorded as systematically as B 40, pt. 1, pp. 1–83 possible. This is done by writing field notes and by Brown P, Levinson S C 1987 Politeness: Some UniŠersals in transcribing recordings of social encounters, activities, Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, and events. Field notes are important because they UK provide researchers with a chance to document im- Duranti A 1997 Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University portant information (which is soon forgotten if not Press, Cambridge, UK written down) and reflect on what they have just Duranti A, Goodwin C (eds.) 1992 Rethinking Context: experienced. Transcription is equally important be- Language as an InteractiŠe Phenomenon. Cambridge Uni- cause it allows researchers to fix on paper (or on a versity Press, Cambridge, UK Foley W A 1997 Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. computer screen) salient aspects of interactions that Blackwell, Malden, MA can then be interpreted, translated, collected, and Goodwin C 1994 Professional vision. compared. Transcription is thus a particular type of 96: 606–33 what Ricoeur called ‘inscription,’ that is an abstraction Goodwin M H 1990 He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organ- and a fixing of something that by nature is or was ization among Black Children. University Press, moving across time and space. Linguistic anthropol- Bloomington, IN ogists strive to produce rich transcripts by relying on Gumperz J J 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University native speakers who have the necessary cultural Press, Cambridge, UK background to provide the information necessary to Gumperz J J, Hymes D E 1964 The ethnography of com- munication. American Anthropologist 66(6) make sense of what is being said. There are many Hall K, Bucholtz M (eds.) 1995 Gender Articulated: Language different ways of transcribing speech and nonverbal and the Socially Constructed Self. Routledge, communication, and it is important for researchers to Hanks W F 1990 Referential Practice: Language and LiŠed become familiar and experiment with more than one Space Among the Maya. Press, Chicago way before choosing the one that better fits their Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in research goals and needs. For example, those who are Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, interested in grammatical analysis must provide word- Cambridge, UK by-word glosses; for those who are interested in the Hill J, Hill K C 1986 Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of a relation between speech and the spatial organization Syncretic Language in Central . University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ of the event, visual representations of the settings Hymes D 1974 Foundations in Socioliguistics: An Ethnographic become crucial; a transcript that utilizes phonetic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia is appropriate when writing for linguists, but Kroskrity P V (ed.) 2000 Regimes of Language: Ideologies, would be too hard to decipher for anyone else. Politics and Identities. School of American Research Press, Similarly, a transcript that tries to cover most of the Santa Fe, NM information available to the participants at the time of Levinson S C 2000 Ye! li Dnye and the theory of basic color speaking would be too cumbersome and equally hard terms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1): 1–53 Lucy J A 1992 Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case to interpret. More generally, a transcript is always Š work in progress. It constitutes a first analysis of the Study of the Linguistic Relati ity Hypothesis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK data collected. It forces us to make important decisions Mandelbaum D G (ed.) 1949 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir about what is salient in an interaction and, at the same in Language, Culture, and Personality. University of California time, while being produced or once completed, it can Press, Berkeley, CA reveal phenomena that we might otherwise have Ochs E 1996 Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In: missed. Gumperz J J, Levinson S C (eds.) Rethinking Linguistic

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RelatiŠity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. language (called field language). The process of 407–37 analyzing its structure and use is therefore closely tied Ochs E, Schieffelin B B 1984 Language acquisition and soci- to the process of language learning. This means that alization: Three developmental stories. In: Shweder R A, the choice of research topics, the sequence in which LeVine R A (eds.) : Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, they are studied, and the research methods and pp. 276–320 techniques depend on the fieldworkers’ progress in Schieffelin B B, Woolard K, Kroskrity P (eds.) 1998 Language learning. The better they understand and speak the Ideologies. , New York language, the higher the quality of their data will be, Silverstein M 1976 Shifters, , and cultural because they will have to rely less on translation. description. In: Basso K H, Selby H A (eds.) Meaning in Although the progress of learning a field language Anthropology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, depends on the structure of the language and the talent NM, pp. 11–56 of the researchers and their teachers, experience shows Whorf B L 1956 Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected that the methods which have been developed for Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf [ed. Carroll J B]. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA learning and analyzing a field language work well for Zentella A C 1997 Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children very different types of languages and people. in New York. Blackwell, Oxford, UK Since languages are never homogenous systems, but show regional, societal, and situational variation, the A. Duranti linguists and the speech communities they work with have to decide which variety should be the object of their first investigation. Only when they have a good command of one variety can they endeavor to study another. Linguistic Fieldwork 3. Time Plan 1. History Before leaving for fieldwork, the researchers gather as The history of linguistic fieldwork began in the much information as possible about the field language, nineteenth century when linguists started to explore and the political and sociocultural situation of the the dialects of European languages. The most famous speech community they are going to visit. If no fieldworker of this time was Edmond Edmont who information of the structure of the language is avail- helped the Swiss dialectologist Jules Gillie! ron to collect able, they should try to access information about data for the Atlas linguistique de France. Cycling to related languages in order to get an idea of what to 639 locations, he interviewed 700 speakers expect. For the work in the field itself, the ideal time (Chambers and Trudgill 1980, p. 20). Non-European plan consists of at least three field trips. The first trip is unwritten languages were first systematically investi- used for establishing contact and collecting the first gated on a large scale by the anthropologist Franz Boas samples of data. On the second trip the main body of (1858–1942), who started to do fieldwork on American data is collected, while the last trip will be used for Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century. filling gaps and checking what has remained unclear Boas was also the teacher of a number of influential after the analysis and description of the results of the twentieth century anthropologists and linguists, e.g., previous trip. , Edward Sapir, and Leonard Data collection during the fieldwork is not confined Bloomfield. to audio or video recording of spoken language and Until recently linguistic fieldwork on unwritten non- taking notes during interviews. Rather, all recordings European languages did not attract much attention in need to be transcribed and translated with the help of mainstream linguistics. It is only since the early 1990s native speakers who understand exactly the context of that the linguistic departments of universities and the the speech situation and what the people are talking professional societies have become increasingly aware about. In addition, the fieldworker should at least of the need for researching these languages, about 90 draft a rough analysis of the data, as only analysis and percent of which are endangered (Grenoble and description reveal gaps and unclear items in the data. Whaley 1998, Krauss 1992). If for practical and financial reasons it is not possible to visit the fieldwork site several times, the fieldworker has to structure her\his stay into comparable phases 2. Learning and Analyzing Unresearched of work, so that phases of interviews and recording, Languages translation, and transcription alternate with phases where the researcher steps back from data collection in Fieldwork on languages which have not yet been order to concentrate on analysis and description. described differs from other kinds of linguistic field- The question of how much time has to be planned work in that the linguist comes to the speech com- for doing fieldwork with the purpose of writing a munity with no or only marginal knowledge of the grammar, compiling a dictionary, or editing a reason-

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Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7