This article discusses the narrative architecture and interactional uptake of a school child's story about independence in Barbados during sharing time. It is found that an institutional focus on standard resources impacts both teachers' and children's sociolinguistic behavior. Ethnopoetic analysis brings out the child's patterned use of narrative…

Identity has become a major interest for researchers in the areas of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Recent understandings of identity emphasize its malleability and fluidity. This conceptualization of identities as malleable comes from the realization that speakers relate strategically to propositions and their interlocutors in…

From an epistemological perspective, Wilhelm von Humboldt's studies on the Oriental and East Asian languages and writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, Chinese, Polynesian) raise the question of his position in the Orientalist discourse of his time. Said [Said, E.W., 1978. "Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient, fourth…

Since Berlin and Kay's proposal in 1969 of two universals concerning the meanings of basic color words, three kinds of information have become available to help in understanding the encoding sequence, that is, the temporal order in which the basic color categories are accorded lexical status. McDaniel (1972, 1974, forthcoming) demonstrates that…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

Presents a look at some of the research being done on the origins of language. (BB)

This paper is an attempt to summarize as explicitly as possible certain empirical findings of classical biosystematics and modern semantic ethnography which may be considered to represent formal universals of human mental structure. The paper offers a formal treatment of the subject of taxonomy, and an application of the formalism to several…

Discusses the design of an undergraduate survey course in anthropological linguistics that both acquaints students with language structure and traces the cross-fertilizing relationships that bind it to other specialties within anthropology. Considers utilizing the holistic approach which views language and culture as forming a continuum of coded…

This paper demonstrates, with reference to the Samal of Tagtabon Island, how the structure of local domestic groups and the statistical distribution of residence types can be derived from a detailed description of the decision rules used by Samal native actors themselves in making, evaluating and predicting residence choices. Considering the…

Attempts have been made by linguists and anthropologists to reconstruct aspects of culture history by using synchronically derived lexical data. Related to this concern with culture history is one which attempts to explore the diachronic processes of lexical change over time. As a result of a comparative survey of Tzeltal and Tzotzil…

This volume brings together the insights of more than 40 contributors who demonstrate that anthropology has timely, important, and enduring messages for students and the public. The book provides the first comprehensive examination of teaching issues across all the subfields of anthropology since the 1963 publication of "The Teaching of…

This monograph represents the results of an attempt to construct at least one portion of a theoretical framework for describing and analyzing the performance routines used by the native actor to realize his competence to make culturally appropriate decisions. In general the concern is to describe in theoretical terms the structure and operation of…

This book contains 23 essays which provide an overview of the state of the art in the discipline of anthropology, including applied anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, social anthropology, and linguistics. Most of the authors are professors and researchers from departments of anthropology in United States colleges and universities. Topics of the…

A selective survey of the available Aleut literature dating from 1802-1973 and published in English, this annotated bibliography (one in a series on Alaska Native groups) is intended as a research tool for those interested in the sociological aspects of the Aleuts and their culture. Section One, designed for quick reference, lists the literature…