English 806-001
Seminar in Linguistics: Language and Culture
Instr: Mayes, Patricia
Office: CRT 486; 229-6992
e-mail: mayes@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: M; 4:30-7:10pm; CRT 466
Course Description
The nature of the relationship between language and culture is the central focus in the discipline known as linguistic anthropology. In this course, we will examine some of the foundational topics in linguistic anthropology and trace the development of what has been a central question in the field: whether the linguistic structures and practices associated with a particular culture provide evidence for cultural universals on the one hand or cultural relativism on the other. We will start out by discussing how culture has been defined and reviewing the kinds of linguistic evidence that might give us information about culture. Then, we will examine traditional approaches that focus on cognitive and semantic aspects of linguistic structure in an attempt to find universal patterns, moving to more recent work that examines the same questions by looking at social practices and interaction. We will follow the discipline's shift in focus on cognition and worldview to an emphasis on sociopolitical practices and ideologies, as we examine the development of the ethnography of speaking and the study of discourse, which in recent years has become the central focus of linguistic anthropological research.
