Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking
- 536pagine
- 19 ore di lettura
Classic case studies surveying the use, role and function of language and speech in social life.
Studi nelle Fondamenta Sociali e Culturali del Linguaggio Serie
Questa serie approfondisce l'intricata relazione tra linguaggio, società e cultura. Esplora come i contesti sociali e le norme culturali modellano significati e funzioni linguistiche. Ogni volume offre contributi etnografici e teorici sostanziali per comprendere la variazione linguistica in culture diverse. La collezione è una lettura essenziale per studiosi di antropologia linguistica, sociolinguistica e campi correlati.
Language Diversity and Thought
A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
Language Diversity and Thought examines the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: the proposal that the grammar of the particular language that we speak affects the way we think about reality. Adopting a historical approach, the book reviews the various lines of empirical inquiry that arose in America in response to the ideas of anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin L. Whorf. John Lucy asks why there has been so little fruitful empirical research on this problem and what lessons can be learned from past work. He then proposes a new, more adequate approach to future empirical research. A companion volume, Grammatical Categories and Cognition, illustrates the proposed approach with an original case study. The study compares the grammar of American English with that of Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language spoken in southeastern Mexico, and then identifies distinctive patterns of thinking related to the differences between the two languages.