Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking
- 536 pages
- 19 hours of reading
Classic case studies surveying the use, role and function of language and speech in social life.
Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language Series
This series delves into the intricate relationship between language, society, and culture. It explores how social contexts and cultural norms shape linguistic meanings and functions. Each volume offers substantial ethnographic and theoretical contributions to understanding language variation across diverse cultures. The collection is essential reading for scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and related fields.
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.