Anthropological linguistics

The anthropological study of languages.

Anthropology

A discipline that studies humans, focusing on the study of differences and similarities, both biological and cultural, in human populations. Anthropology is concerned with typcial biological and cultural characteristics of human populations in all periods and in all parts of the world.

Applied Anthropology

The branch of anthropology that concerns itself with applying anthropological knowledge to achieve practical goals, usually in the service of an agency outside the traditional academic setting.

Archaeology

The branch of anthropology that seeks to re-construct the daily life and customs of peoples who lived in the past and to trace and explain cultural changes. Often lacking written records for study, archaeologists must try to re-construct history from the material remains of human cultures.

Biological (physical) Anthropology

The study of humans as biological organisms, dealing with the emergence and evolution of humans and with contemporary biological variations among human populations.

Cross-cultural researcher

An ethnologist who uses ethnographic data about many societies to test possible explanations of cultural variation to discover general patterns about cultural traits--what is universal, what is variable, why traits vary, and what the consequences of the variability might be.

Descriptive (structural) linguistics

The study of how languages are constructed.

Ethnographer

A person who spends some time living with, interviewing, and observing a group of people to describe their customs.

Ethnography

A description of a society's customary behaviors and ideas.

Ethnohistorian

An ethnologist who uses historical documents to study how a particular culture has changed over time.

Fossils

The hardened remains or impressions of plants and animals that lived in the past.

Historical archaeology

A specialty within archaeology that studies the material remains of recent peoples who left written records.

Historical linguistics

The study of how languages change over time.

Holistic

Refers to an approach that studies many aspects of a multifaceted system.

Homo sapiens

All living people belong to one biological species, Homo sapiens, which means that all human populations on earth can successfully interbreed. The first Homo sapiens may have emerged 200,000 years ago.

human paleontology

The study of the emergence of humans and their later physical evolution. Also called paleoanthropology.

human variation

The study of how and why contemporary human populations vary biologically.

prehistory

The time before written records.

primates

A member of the mammalian order Primates, divided into the two suborders of prosimians and anthropoids.

primatologists

People who study primates.

sociolinguistics

The study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speaking in different social contexts.

acculturation

The process of extensive borrowing of aspects of culture in the context of superordinate--subordinate relations between societies; usually occurs as the result of external pressure.

adaptive customs

Cultural traits that enhance survival and reproductive success in a particular environment.

cultural relativism

The attitude that a society's customs and ideas should be viewed within the context of that society's problems and opportunities.

culture

The set of learned behaviors and ideas (including beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals) that are characteristic of a particular society or population.

diffusion

The borrowing by one society of a cultural trait belonging to another society as the result of contact between the two societies.

ethnocentric

Refers to judment of other cultures solely in terms of one's own culture.

ethnocentrism

The attitude that other societies' customs and ideas can be judged in the context of one's own culture.

ethnogenesis

The process of the creation of a new culture.

globalization

The ongoing spread of goods, people, information, and capital around the world.

maladaptive customs

Cultural traits that diminish the chances of survival and reproduction in a particular environment.

revolution

A usually violent replacement of a society's rulers.

society

A group of people who occupy a particular territory and speak a common language not generally understood by neighboring peoples. By this definition, societies do not necessarily correspond to nations.

subculture

The shared customs of a subgroup within a society.

behavioral ecology

Typically tries to understand contemporary human behavior using evolutionary principles. In addition to the principle of individual selection, behavioral ecologists point to the importance of analyzing economic tradeoffs because individuals have limited time and resources.

cultural ecology

The analysis of the relationship between a culture and its environment.

dual-inheritance theory

In contrast to other evolutionary ecological perspectives, this theory gives much more importance to culture as part of the evolutionary process. Dual inheritance refers to both genes and culture playing different, but nonetheless important and interactive roles in transmitting traits to future generations.

ethnoscience

An apporach that attempts to derive rules of thought from the logical analysis of ethnographic data.

eugenics

Selectively breeding humans with desirable characteristics and preventing those with undesirable ones from having offspring.

evolutionary psychology

A type of evolutionary ecological approach that is particularly interested in universal human psychology. It is argued that human psychology was primarily adapted to the environment that characterized most of human history--the hunting-gathering way of life.

functionalism

The theoretical orientation that looks for the part (function) that some aspect of culture or social life plays in maintaining a cultural system.

general evolution

The notion that higher forms of culture arise from and generally supersede lower forms.

genus

A group of related species.

group selection

Natural selection of group characteristics.

hermeneutics

The study of meaning.

individual selection

Natural selection of individual characteristics.

political economy

The study of how external forces, particularly powerful state societies, explain the way a society changes and adapts.

sociobiology

Systematic study of the biological causes of human behavior. Compare with behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and dual-inheritance theory.

specific evolution

The particular sequence of change and adaptation of a society in a given environment.

structuralism

The theoretical orientation that human culture is a surface representation of the underlying structure of the human mind.

theoretical orientation

A general attitude about how phenomena are to be explained.

explanation

An answer to a why question. In science, researchers try to achieve two kinds of explanations: associations and theories.

falsification

Showing that a theory seems to be wrong by finding that implications or predictions derivable from it are not consistent with objectively collected data.

fieldwork

Firsthand experience with the people being studied and the usual means by which anthropological information is obtained. Regardless of other methods that anthropologists may use (e.g., censues, surveys), fieldwork usually involves participant-observation for an extended period of time, often a year or more.

hypotheses

Predictions, which may be derived from theories, about how variables are related.

laws

Associations or relationships that almost all scientists accept.

measure

To describe how something compares with other things on some scale of variation.

operational definition

A description of the procedure that is followed in measuring a variable.

participant-observation

Living among the people being studied--observing, questioning, and (when possible) taking part in the important events of the group. Writing or otherwise recording notes on observations, questions asked and answered, and things to check out later are parts of participant-observation.

probability value (p-value)

The likelihood that an observed result could have occurred by chance.

sampling universe

The list of cases to be sampled from.

statistical association

A relationship or correlation between two or more variables that is unlikely to be due to chance.

statistically significant

Refers to a result that would occur very rarely by chance. The result (and stronger ones) would occur fewer than 5 times out of 100 by chance.

theoretical construct

Something that cannot be observed or verified directly.

theories

Explanations of associations or laws.

variables

A thing or quantity that varies.

accent

Differences in pronunciation characteristic of a group.

code-switching

Using more than one language in the course of conversing.

cognates

Words or morphs that belong to different languages but have similar sounds and meanings.

core vocabulary

Nonspecialist vocabulary.

dialects

A variety of a language spoken in a particular area or by a particular social group.

historical linguistics

The study of how languages change over time.

kinesics

The study of communication by nonvocal means, including posture, mannerisms, body movement, facial expressions, and signs and gestures.

lexical content

Vocabulary or lexicon.

lexicon

The words and morphs, and their meanings, of a language; approximated by a dictionary.

morph

The smallest unit of a language that has a meaning.

morpheme

One or more morphs with the same meaning.

morphology

The study of how sound sequences convey meaning.

paralanguage

Refers to all the optional vocal features or silences apart from the language itself that communicate meaning.

phoneme

A sound or set of sounds that makes a difference in meaning to the speakers of the language.

phones

A speech sound in a language.

phonology

The study of the sounds in a language and how they are used.

protolanguage

A hypothesized ancestral language from which two or more languages seem to have derived.

syntax

The ways in which words are arranged to form phrases and sentences.

symbolic communication

An arbitrary (not obviously meaningful) gesture, call, word, or sentence that has meaning even when its referent is not present.

cash crops

A cultivated commodity raised for sale rather than for personal consumption by the cultivator.

commercialization

The increasing dependence on bying and selling, with money usually as the medium of exchange.

extensive (shifting) cultivation

A type of horticulture in which the land is worked for short periods and then left to regenerate for some years before being used again. Also called shifting cultivation.

food production

The form of subsistence technology in which food-getting is dependent on the cultivation and domestication of plants and animals.

foraging

May be generally defined as a food-getting strategy that obtains wild plan and animal resources through gathering, hunting, scavenging, or fishing; also known as food collection.

horticulture

Plant cultivation carried out with relatively simple tools and methods; nature is allowed to replace nutrients in the soil, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields.

hunter-gatherers

People who collect food from naturally occurring resources, that is, wild plants, animals, and fish. The term hunter-gatherers minimizes sometimes heavy dependence on fishing. Also referred to as foragers or food collectors.

intensive agriculture

Food production characterized by the permanent cultivation of fields and made possible by the use of the plow, draft animals or machines, fertilizers, irrigation, water-storage techniques, and other complex agricultural techniques.

pastoralism

A form of subsistence technology in which food-getting is based directly or indirectly on the maintenance of domesticated animals.

prairie

Grassland with a high grass cover.

savanna

Tropical grassland.

slash-and-burn

A form of shifting cultivation in which the natural vegetation is cut down and burned off. The cleared ground is used for a short time and left to regenerate.

steppe

Grassland with a dry, low grass cover.

subsistence economies

Economies in which almost all able-bodied adults are largely engaged in getting food for themselves and their families.

What are the major subdisciplines within anthropology?

1. Physical (biological anthropology)

2. Archaeology

3. Linguistic Anthropology

4. Cultural Anthropology

5. Applied Anthropology

6. Cross-disciplines

What are the major building blocks of language?

1. Phonemes

2. Morphemes

3. Syntax

4. Discourse

5. Pragmatics

What are the major theoretical frameworks?

1. Evolutionary Theory

2. Historical Particularism

3. Diffusionism

4. Functionalism

What is the difference between signs and symbols?

Symbols = more abstract that signs.

Anthropologist Leslie White—“ It is impossible for a dog, horse, or even an ape, to have any understanding of the meaning of the sign of the cross to a Christian, or of the act that black (white among the Chinese) is the color of mourning. No chimpanzee or laboratory rat can appreciate the difference between Holy water and distilled water, or grasp the meaning of Tuesday, 3, or sin.”