Language and Culture

Fall 2005, TR 11:00-12:15

The course on Language and Culture investigates the intimate connections between symbol use, metaphor, and community, all taken in their broadest semiotic senses.  Through foundation lectures, readings, examples, discussions, and individual studies, the class identifies and explores basic premises of (1) comparative-historical linguistics, (2) structural linguistics, (3) sociolinguistics, and (4) cultural semiotics.  Through these diverse activities, we will attempt to understand how symbolic systems influence perception and define alternative cultural worlds. Additionally, we will investigate the ways linguistic science has influenced the practices of ethnography and ethnohistory. 

This term there will be no assigned text book.  Instead, we will employ the Distance2Learn on-line resource to explore readings and examples.  The D2L resource allows us to build a glossary, maintain on-line examples and exercises, and complete periodic assignments and examinations.  Students who want access to a text may want to order Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages, by Nancy Bonvillain.  The texts grounds much of my approach to linguistic anthropology. 

Course Assignments:  As formal work, in addition to two mid-term examinations, each student will complete a series of practical exercises relating to linguistic concepts.  The final examination will involve a  combination of problems, multiple-choice questions, and essays.  The final examination may include “individual” questions relating to class research.  Each student will also be responsible to participate in classroom and on-line discussions, and to develop an individual project.  Projects may be individual or group activities, but individual work must be clearly identifiable in submitted portfolios.  The projects can include (but are not limited to) term essays, annotated bibliography projects, oral presentations, artistic portfolios, or other activities contracted with me in advance.  All written projects will include language or speech analysis, employing at least one formal approach to “linguistic” or “semiotic” study. Art projects must include a series of topically related works, and must relate in some way to language or semiotics (i.e. reflections on experience through signs).  Projects relating to gender, vernacular English, and “world view” are particularly encouraged, though some students may want to work with other languages.  Students pursuing foreign language at UWF may direct their linguistic work to their study language, and may also complete some of their regular class assignments in that language (French, German, and Spanish are accepted for short essay assignments from students who are enrolled in or have completed a “composition and conversation” class of their language, or the equivalent).

The Semiotic Society of America is meeting in Pensacola during this term (the weekend of October 21-23).  Students who develop approved projects in August may be encouraged to submit for placement on the program of the meeting.

Learning Outcomes:  Students who complete this course successfully will demonstrate basic facility with articulatory phonetics, syntactic analysis, and semiotic principles.  The successful student will be able to (1) transcribe and analyze an “unknown” language, (2) draw cogent morphological parallels between historically related languages,  (3) apply these techniques in work with English dialects, and (4) offer writing critiques of others based on such application.  These concepts underpinning these skills will also allow entry into more specialized courses on linguistics and culture.  The class also develops background which will aid students in some advanced courses on critical theory, postmodern theories of culture, and multicultural education  Although the class centers key concepts more than on technical skills, the basic concepts rest on a minimal facility with phonemics, morphology, and other basic forms of linguistic pattern analysis. 

For more information, contact me at 474-2186 (messages at 474-2797), or tprewitt@uwf.edu; some additional information may be found at http:/www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/ in the teaching subpages.  My office hours are Mondays from 1:00-2:15 and Tuesday-Thursday 9:15-10:45. I will also be available by appointment. 

COURSE STRUCTURE:

UNITS 1--PHONETICS. The Sound System.  Standard phonetic transcription.  Features and their manifestations, the Prague circle and distinctive-feature analysis, practice writing with modifications of the IPA.

UNIT 2--PHONEMICS. Discovering phonemes. Minimal Pairs, describing complementary distributions, free variation.

    THE EMIC CONCEPT.  Kenneth Pike’s theory of language – understanding the original definitions of Etic and Emic.

UNITS 3--MORPHOLOGY.  Words, Segments, Utterances, and Phrase Structure,

UNIT 4--SYNTAX.  Writing Syntactic Rules, Developing Transformation Rules, and applications to cultural analysis.

UNIT 5--SEMANTICS.  Cultural Meaning.  Learned, shared, behavior?

    PARADIGMATIC MEANING.             

    SYNTAGMATIC MEANING.

    SYNTHETIC THEORIES OF LANGUAGE.  Chomsky, Competence, and Performance.

    SEMANTIC GRAMMARS.

UNIT 6--THE ALGORITHM OF LANGUAGE.  Acquisition of Language and Recent Theories of Language Origins.

    ZOOSEMIOTICS. Interpreting communicative behavior in animals.

    HOMINOID LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS.  Out of Africa.     

    CAVE ART, AUTISM, AND LANGUAGE ORIGINS. 

    MOUSTERIAN TOOLS AND LANGUAGE.  Theories of linguistic development as a parallel of technological development.

    SPATIAL MEMORY AND MEANING.  Semiotics of “syntax” in prelinguistic Hominoid populations.

UNIT 7--HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS.

    THE COMPARATIVE METHOD.  Building historical relationships through cognate analysis.

    LEXICOSTATISTICS AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.  Why glottochronology is a limited tool.

    LINGUISTIC VARIABLES.  Sociolinguistics and theories of language change.  Labov’s idea of the linguistic variable

UNIT 8--SEMIOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS.  Some basic ideas of the Saussurean system.  Signifier/Signified, dualistic system of mind and world, phenomenology of language.

UNIT 9--SEMIOTICS, OR "REFLECTION" ON SEMIOSIS.  Semiotics:  some basic ideas of the Peircean system.  Icon, Index, Symbol; qualities, sense/perception, and cultural construction.

UNIT 10--WRITING SYSTEMS. 

    THE BASIS OF WRITING--LOGOGRAPHS, ICONIC FORMS, AND PHONETIC GRAPHEMES.

    EARLY SYSTEMS

    DERIVED SYSTEMS

    WRITING AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS--Gender and as reflected in writing.

UNIT 11--ETHNOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS.  Componential Analysis and Ethnoscience.

    DOMAIN ANALYSIS.  The “distribution” of meaningful forms.  Systems for discerning cultural agreement (after Agar, Professional Stranger).

    ELICITING/MEASURING SHAREDNESS. Frame Analysis.

    THEMAL ANALYSIS.  Some basic ideas of the Oplerian system.

UNIT 12--DISCOURSE ANALYSIS.  Structure and meaning in narrative and discourse – examples of structural analysis and rule writing involving syntactic and semantic categories.                     

    STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION. Classical notions of syntax and the semantic-syntactic-contextual descriptive system. Examples from dance, performance,  and natural language.       

    SOCIOLINGUISTICS.  Class, Dialect and Style.

    GENDERED SPEECH.  Sociolinguistics of Gender in English.

    STATISTICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE BIAS.   Counting pronouns and other lexical classes.

    PROXEMICS AND PARA-LANGUAGE.  Sociolinguistics of Gender across Cultures.