The paper interprets Whorf's notion by turning to his original writings. Specifically, the paper makes a detailed analysis of Whorf's notion from anthropological linguistics, which largely deals with his famous distinction between overt category and covert category and his detailed description of the American Indian language Hopi; contrastive…

Purpose: This paper aims to outline the misguided underpinnings of the "word gap" concept promoted by Hart and Risley (1995). This concept posits that a "30 million word gap" between children of poverty and those from affluent households accounts for widespread academic disparities. Based on this premise, there has been a…

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…

This paper discusses the relationship between entrenched beliefs about language ("language ideologies") and the linguistic system, and considers how conflicts between propositional and procedural knowledge about language have an effect upon the way in which language is regulated within society. It examines the epistemological foundations for…

Using the Practice Theory Approach to Language, this dissertation examines how social actors use communicative practices within activities to constitute a communicative context that I call the American English Stuttering Speech Community (AESSC). Building on previous linguistic research on stuttering and sociological research on collectives of…

This paper starts by examining recent work by applied linguists who argue that creativity is not only a property of especially skilled and gifted language users, but is pervasive in routine everyday practice. Also variously addressing literariness, language play and humour, this apparent democratization of creativity contributes to a more general…

This article explores issues to be addressed in testing the validity of proposed correlations between the rise of a certain class of words and the development of literacy. Possible correlations point not to writing but to the language of law courts, feudal practices, and rhetorical debate in the Middle Ages. (Author/MT)

Five examples are presented of how native speakers may try to explain a grammatical point to a linguist, and in the absence of a suitable meta-language, adopt some "lateral" way of demonstrating the point. (five references) (Author/LB)

Suggests the outlines of a theory of how sociocultural and grammatical knowledge are integrated in the construction of personal names and how such knowledge can be retrieved from surface linguistic forms. Draws on anthropological and linguistic procedures to analyse the Yoruba personal naming system and the sociolinguistic principles that underly…

Explores how an anthropological perspective provides a necessary basis for an account of several aspects of the language acquisition process. Discussion focuses on how the patterns of development in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics appear to be profoundly influenced by the range of adult language structures. (Author/CB)

This document is an attempt at a comprehensive bibliography of all published and unpublished materials relevant to the Lakota (Teton Dakota or Teton Sioux) language with comments for most items. The period covered is from 1887 to 1987, the date of the publication of James Pilling's "Bibliography of the Siouan Languages" (1887). Items in…

In a brief analysis of Hopi consonant gradation, residual exceptions to Heath's generalizations about i-ablaut in Uto-Aztecan languages from Hopi are examined. In Heath's (1977, 1978) reconstruction of Proto-Uto-Aztecan verb morphophonemics, a consonant gradation is reconstructed when a final vowel of a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) root…

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…

Discusses the importance of uncovering the universal features of proper names and relating them to different naming systems. Suggests that this viewpoint may lead to an appreciation of proper names as a sociolinguistic universal and a cultural variable, beyond the particulars on which most of the literature has focused. (MES)

Caste and language in the Jaffna Hindu Tamil society were correlated based on data collected from sample villages in the Jaffna peninsula, where the political and economic ascendancy of the landlords was very dominant in the recent past. (SW)