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Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists—including the production of differentially valued identities, the circulation and transformation of cultural models, and nation states' establishment of official peoples—linguistic anthropological research on education also contributes to cultural and linguistic anthropology more generally This article defines linguistic anthropology through its focus on language form, use, ideology, and domain, and it reviews linguistic anthropological research that focuses on these four aspects of educational language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power an inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, an situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also catalyzed a number of experimental studies by psychologists and linguists in search of a universal sound-symbolic substrate underlying all languages. Although the search for a sound-symbolic substrate has been abandoned, the success rates of these studies have never been satisfactorily explained. Sound-symbolic processes have had a definitive impact on morphological analyses of phonesthemes and on historical linguists' understandings of diachronic processes. A typologically widespread form of sound symbolism occurs as a kind of lexical class known as the ideophone, which is conspicuously underdeveloped in standard average European languages, and highly perplexing for linguists and anthropologists. Although it has always been a respectable domain of inquiry in ethnopoetics and interpretive ethnography, the case for sound symbolism has of late been argued with renewed vigor on the part of psychological anthropologists and philosophers who see a paradigm shift under way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years, as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed, some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships, discard those that prove incorrect, and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic "distance" between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on linguistic or language ideology which was broadly defined as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world." The authors review several researches on the nature, structure and use of language's cultural conception as well as the conceptions of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order. The studies reviewed ranged from seemingly neutral cultural conceptions of language to strategies for maintaining social power and from the unconscious ideology read from speech practices by analysts to the most conscious native-speaker explanations of appropriate language behavior.

The article presents a review of the literature on pidgins and creole linguistics. The social contexts that fostered the linguistic genesis of pidgins and creoles is discussed. The overall sophistication of the linguistic analyses done on pidgins and creoles has sharply increased. One of the main issues in pidgin and creole studies is whether pidgins and creoles represent a special type of language. The genetic relationship between pidgins and their substrates or superstrates is a crucial one to sort out.

The author discusses the relation between language and political economy. He aims to identify the set of themes present in current anthropological and linguistic research which can be read as investigations of links among language structure, language use and political economy. Some of these research works were inspired by Marxist concepts while others were patterned from "socially constituted linguistics" or of interpretative approaches which are both grounded on ethnography and careful descriptions of local linguistic practices.

The article presents information on nonlinear phonology. Aside from morphology and syntax, it is important to distinguish the interpretative components of grammar such as semantics and phonology. These interpretative components assign meaning and pronunciations to the grammar structures which arises from the combination of morphology and syntax. The author aims to establish the properties of phonological representations that are not logically necessary and thus, may provide data about the structure of the human linguistic mechanism. Phonological representations, according to linear theories of phonology consists of a linear sequence of matrixes and each of this matrix is composed of an unstructured set of binary distinctive feature specifications.

The article discusses the interaction between morphology and syntax. The two dominant approaches that accommodate the relationship between syntax and morphology have opposite views when examining the place of syntactically relevant morphology in grammar. The first approach proposes that words are introduced into the structure fully inflected, therefore, all morphology is part of a single grammatical component. The second approach, on the other hand, proposes that some of the morphological properties are consequence of the structural configuration in which they occur, therefore, morphological properties are distributed across two seperate components, one to which the syntax has access and another in which the syntax has no access.

The article focuses on the study of language used in dispute as a connection to social and linguistic anthropology. Laura Nader's essay on the law of anthropology discussed the arguments involved in disputing talk from a wide range of perspectives and variety of audiences. Children's arguments have been the center of the complete and aggravating studies of dispute language. The language of dispute involve several issues based on theoretical studies. One area of concern is the role of communication in contention settlement. Mather & Yngvesson's model of dispute transformation presents the means by which the issues are narrowed, broadened or altered as cases are solved. Koch suggested a heuristic typology of dispute management processes.

The article presents the linguistic typology and the three way language classification through morphological typology. Morphological typology states that world languages are isolating, agglutinating and fusional. Greenberg's paper on work order universals revealed the four word order types: subject-object-verb, possessor-noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition; like a but with noun-adjective; verb-subject-object, noun-possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun; like c but with subject-verb-object. Government and Binding Theory's versions of generative grammar are pro-drop and configurationality that manifested language as correlated and hierarchical.

The article talks about the separation of linguistics from major fields of study into one, independent body of knowledge in the 1960s. The great period of theoretical concern set in during the 1960s when linguistics cited the need to clean up the act, to achieve theoretical respectability rather than just to be the servant of other fields, to establish the field as a legitimate academic enterprise, in short, to become independent and to create a separate academic identity. By this time, linguistics moved away from psychology, anthropology, and education for many reasons, to be sure, but the need to be independent was a primary cause.

The article examines developments in Mayan Linguistics as of October 1985. The study of Mayan languages has seen advances and setbacks in the last several years. Political events in Central America have stalled investigations by several Mayan specialists in the 1970s. 31 languages comprise the Mayan family, spoken principally in Guatemala and southern Mexico. A list of the members of the five subgroups of the Mayan languages is provided. The five subgroups include Huastecan, Yucatecan and Cholan-Tzeltalan.

The article presents a study that will examine selected contributions of linguistics to education across the life span in both informal and formal settings. The study considers primarily the work of the past five years since 1979 in an attempt to set the work in a historical perspective. Furthermore, it focuses primarily on those linguistic inquiries which include the study of language in its sociocultural context. The study centers on three topics which include child language, the language of work and leisure, and oral and literate traditions.

The article offers information about some of the grammatical theories compatible with the assumptions of anthropologically oriented students of language and with the theoretical work of scholars. The study aims at closing the gap between the study of language and the study of communication and tries to give grammar a direct material grounding in the communicative situation. It also provides a survey intended to give some idea of the goals and types of functionalist thought in linguistics. Finally, the study concludes that the various functionalist approaches are essentially complementary. Most functionalists seem to perceive a unity of goals and methods, despite the plethora of senses of function.

The article examines the Proto-Athapaskan (PA) phonology of the Athapaskan linguistics, a group of Amerindian languages of which name coined by an American anthropologist Edward Sapir. It discusses the proposal of a PA inventory by Michael Krauss, the structural relationship of PA obstruents, the analysis on Athapaskan fricatives and the reconstruction of sonorant phonemes for the inventory of PA. Furthermore, a comparative morphology, particularly those involving the so-called mode and aspect categories and the pronominal system, has also been discussed in an attempt to enlighten the field of comparative Athapaskan and dialectology.

The article discusses the nature and development of Australian languages. This literature explores the ways in which almost all Australian languages are genetically related. Furthermore, it discusses the low-level subgroups containing from two to seven or eight languages as well as the absence of detailed work on the possibility of higher-level subgrouping in terms of shared innovations during development. It also presents the similar sets of consonant and vowel phonemes of most Australian languages, the phonotactic structures, and the languages' speech style that must be used in the presence of a taboo relative.

The article presents the author's brief personal assessment of the theoretical state of the field of neurolinguistics, while focusing on certain fundamental issues relevant to the way the field is viewed by both potential users in other disciplines and by investigators in the field. It also discusses the cultural anthropologists' skepticism about the immediate relevance of neurolinguistic findings for ethnographic description and the concern among neurolinguists and others in male/female differences in brain anatomy and cognitive processing as well as the absence of cross-cultural verification of neurolinguistic findings.

The article presents a review of Karl Verner's study of language change within the Western tradition, which demonstrated the distinction between a conditioned change and an unconditioned change. The author presented a historical perspective about the language change but it eventually made him trace the stimuli which led to the present lexical perspective. He discussed the similarities between linguistic laws and evolutionary laws in biology, the sources of difficulty with the neogrammarian doctrine, the isolation of language from its social context, the exclusive assumption of phonetic gradualness and the reality of lexical diffusion as it is observed in a variety of languages.

The article focuses on developments in the study of linguistic variations and cites several works that offer important anticipations of variation theory on linguistic. It discusses the role of society in linguistic change and language pattern and examines the reason on the decline of interest in variation studies and on the failure of institutes in converting the linguistic public. It concludes that the antitheoritical position of many variationists and the lack of theoretical ability on linguistic training had negatively affect studies on linguistic.

The article provides information about bilingualism, an anthropological evidence that has proven fertile ground for deriving insights into the subject matter of fields whose immediate interests have different focal points. This literature provides an understanding of the nature of bilingualism has benefited from the insights brought to it by investigators representing different points of view. It talks about bilingualism as a phenomenon that has occupied the attention of linguists, psychologists, sociologists, and educators, among others, each group approaching the it from its own point of view and in the interests of its own discipline.