LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY - History of Linguistic Anthropology - Alessandro Duranti
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Alessandro Duranti
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
Keywords: Language as culture, history of anthropology in the U.S., American Indian
languages, linguistic diversity, linguistic relativity, the ethnography of communication,
language socialization, indexicality, heteroglossia.
Contents
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PL C
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AP L
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1. Introduction
2. The First Paradigm: The Boasian Tradition
3. The Second Paradigm: The Ethnography of Communication and the Birth of
Sociolinguistics
4. New Directions of Research: Language Socialization, Indexicality, and Heteroglossia
5. A Third Paradigm: Language as a Flux of Indexical Values
6. Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Biographical Sketch
Summary
The field of linguistic anthropology was born in the United States and Canada at the
beginning of the twentieth century as one of the four fields of North American
anthropology. At first it was mainly focused on the documentation of aboriginal
languages (especially in North America) and grammatical structures. Later it became
more concerned with language-mediated activities and the relationship between
language and context. The chapter uses Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift framework to
discuss how goals, key concepts, units of analysis, issues, and methods have changed
over the last one hundred years without necessarily replacing older paradigms. The first
paradigm emerged with the pioneering work of Franz Boas on American Indian
languages and continues today in the descriptive work of so-called “field linguists,”
who are committed to writing grammars of previously undocumented aboriginal
languages around the world. This paradigm persists today in much of so-called
cognitively oriented linguistics (and cognitive oriented anthropologists) especially with
regard to their interest in...