ANT 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Diglossia, Proxemics, Paralanguage
20 Apr 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
What is language: a systems of sounds or gestures that when put together according to certain rules they result in meanings that are intelligible to all speakers. Sociolinguistics: the social aspect of what is going on ( ethnography of speaking"); the meaning behind these rules. Gesture-call systems vs. human language: productivity (endless possibilities) You can put the sounds and words together in an endless variety of possibilities: displacement (not directly to physical presence) When we speak a vocal or sign language, we can talk about things that are not (immediately) physically present (past, what didn"t happen) In a gesture call system this cannot be done. **chimps/apes who have learned sign language have proven to show both of the above** **possess the ability to talk about things that are not there*: cultural transmission, chimps and apes do not have the fine-tuned language that humans do. If they cannot communicate like us, we do not consider them to have culture.
