tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-378392142009-06-12T16:22:17.492-05:00The study of language has been part of anthropology since the discipline started in the 1ate 1870s. This site is a place for linguistic anthropologists to post their work and discuss important events and trends in the field.Leila Monaghannoreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-29985690062341082502009-06-12T13:08:00.003-05:002009-06-12T13:09:29.566-05:00

Over the past few weeks I have received email from a number of recent or soon-to-be college graduates asking for my recommendations for graduate programs in linguistic anthropology. I assume that my post regarding Getting started in (linguistic) anthropology has left readers in need of more concrete information.Unfortunately, I don't really feel qualified to give advice on such schools, having

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-90023847605080222522009-06-07T09:50:00.004-05:002009-06-07T10:07:09.404-05:00

[This is a guest post by Claire Bowern, LSA Ethics committee member and blog co-webmaster]The Linguistic Society of America recently finalized and released a statement of professional ethics. The statement was approved at the May Executive Committee meeting after extensive discussion and consultation with members through a blog site (lsaethics.wordpress.com). A pdf of the statement can be found

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-18795117677045566252009-05-29T11:47:00.006-05:002009-05-31T11:53:48.976-05:00

As I promised last week, I have a slightly more elaborate analysis of two functions of negated infinitives. Recall that I experienced a very brief confusion during a speech by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney said something like the following:1. Part of our responsibility was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done.(This is just a portion of Mr. Cheney's sentence, edited

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-10652995441819893002009-05-22T17:04:00.003-05:002009-05-22T17:17:00.257-05:00

In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, former Vice President Cheney made the following suggestion.The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work, proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.I don't want to devalue the difficult work of intelligence officers or to

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-31804131076902902262009-05-22T10:03:00.011-05:002009-05-29T10:45:15.386-05:00

I had two reactions while listening to former Vice President Richard Cheney's speech about national security yesterday, 21 May 2009. In this posting I will describe a purely linguistic and fairly trivial reaction. I'll also have another, I hope more substantive post on the framing of information in that speech and recent terrorism-related discourse.Not to split infinitivesFirst, the trivial

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-17374107163450069682009-04-27T12:56:00.004-05:002009-04-28T09:38:43.893-05:00

The American Anthropological Association has a new blog, which is a very good thing. I think it must be difficult, however, to select topics and coverage broadly enough to satisfy a target audience as diverse as the AAA. Even if that target audience were limited to AAA members it would be huge, and I suspect the AAA bloggers are also targeting a broader audience, at least secondarily - that's

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-5944989066062687452009-04-09T10:51:00.004-05:002009-04-12T08:04:04.819-05:00

The term eggcorn was coined in 2003 by linguist-bloggers Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman, and has spawned something of a cottage industry of eggcorn-hunters on the Web. An eggcorn is defined as "an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect [which] introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-88190475366524907572009-04-06T09:44:00.003-05:002009-04-08T13:06:19.828-05:00

Benjamin Lee Whorf doesn't get much respect from linguists, at least in certain quarters. His notions of linguistic relativism - or just as often, notions attributed to him after the fact - are frequently refuted in popular texts on language and linguistics. Geoffrey Pullum's The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax or Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, for example, seem to take glee in demolishing

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-48612651717431375632009-03-01T09:04:00.004-05:002009-03-01T11:36:34.952-05:00

A few weeks ago I noticed that a lot of people who read Linguistic Anthropology are referred here by search engines. Often the search terms are something like "anthropology - getting started". I suspect that the search engines are directing these readers to How Flame Wars Get Started, and guess that this is probably not what they are looking for (though I hope they enjoy it).I have been thinking

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-91539722335690828822009-02-18T15:44:00.005-05:002009-02-18T16:37:44.898-05:00

Anyone doing work on discourse markers in English might want to look at Greta Van Susteren's recent interview with Bristol Palin. I find the use of the discourse markers 'you know', 'I don't know', and 'I guess' interesting, especially compared with the actual knowledge claims in the exchange. Here is a sample; the transcript is from FOXNews.com, emphasis added.VAN SUSTEREN: You know, it always

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-69559546100265112672009-02-17T16:36:00.007-05:002009-02-18T16:36:08.309-05:00

I recently had two experiences in which people -- college-aged individuals on or near a college campus -- used routine speech formulas in surprising ways.The first was relatively easy to explain. As I left my office, I smiled at a young woman who was sitting just outside the door and said, "Hello."CDN: Hello.Woman: Good, how are you doing?This exchange resembles what Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-7397749747103348592009-02-02T12:13:00.005-05:002009-02-02T12:46:07.689-05:00

Michael Wesch from Digital Ethnography used a very interesting class assignment. "How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class" describes the project in which students found, and summarized for one another, articles to discuss in class.Each student was required to find 5 articles, read them, and summarize them; uploading their summaries (or the author’s own abstract)

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-21046576431568199802009-01-21T15:25:00.002-05:002009-01-21T16:11:58.159-05:00

I recommend Christopher Kelty's piece at Savage Minds, "Thoughts on Imagined Communities on Inauguration day." Each of Kelty's three points may be of interest to linguistic anthropologists and fellow travelers. First, Kelty thinks about online news and the RSS feed in light of Benedict Anderson's suggestion that print capitalism, and newspapers in particular, allow people to imagine the nation

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-1455137402452515942009-01-16T13:20:00.007-05:002009-01-16T14:13:59.531-05:00

Megan Garber, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, notes an interesting difference in the words used to describe the... event involving US Airways flight 1549 on 15 January.Garber quotes the Washington Post as saying the flight "went down in the Hudson River," and the New York Times saying it "landed on the river." In contrast, CNN, MSNBC and Fox television anchors and commentators

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-58734697702629790172009-01-10T13:43:00.003-05:002009-01-11T22:08:25.311-05:00

Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology is hosting the Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008 anthology/awards. Linguistic Anthropology is among the blogs anthologized -- though of course, you've read those already, haven't you? Use this opportunity, then, to check out the fuller view of anthropology's sub-fields.(Full disclosure: Each of the three Linguistic Anthropology nominations came from me.)

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-51816553098687739762008-12-26T04:04:00.006-05:002008-12-26T07:05:16.079-05:00

In his 24 December column, Time to Reboot America, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman compares US education, transportation and communication infrastructure - unfavorably - with that of Hong Kong. He suggests that US government attempts to alleviate the current recession should concentrate on improving this infrastructure. What caught my attention was this aside near the end of the piece:

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-43985668130887756262008-12-20T22:38:00.006-05:002009-01-10T13:57:02.095-05:00

It's not just Japanese publishers and education associations; the New York Times' Week in Review has just published its Word of the Year-esque "Buzzwords of 2008".How's about I just add more links to this post as WOTY-announcements come out? (Oh, and I see I've already missed some. Please feel free to point out more I've missed via comments.)--10 November 2008, Oxford University Press: Word of

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-21375288770379567582008-12-12T04:17:00.004-05:002008-12-19T18:26:40.797-05:00

Not quite two weeks ago Jiyu Kokuminsha named Japan's Fashionable Word of the Year. Today, Nippon Kanji Noryoku Kentei Kyokai (The Japan Kanji Ability Certification Association) named Kotoshi no Kanji, or This Year's Kanji. Each year the group names a kanji, or Chinese character, to encapsulate the year's events.This year's kanji is 変.Pronounced hen, or with accompanying hiragana either kaeru or

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-23588651109338040242008-12-01T06:20:00.006-05:002008-12-01T20:00:32.005-05:00

Japanese publishing company Jiyu Kokuminsha has just announced this year's Shingo Ryukougo, or Fashionable New Words. Similar to Word Of The Year announcements made by various US and UK publishers, Shingo Ryukougo is essentially a publicity event that draws attention to Jiyu Kokuminsha.This year there are actually two winners, and both are loan words from English... sort of. That is, both are

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-70568046138196718642008-11-06T20:41:00.004-05:002008-11-06T21:05:49.885-05:00

--by Peter HaneyAlthough the world will remember 2008 Presidential election as a milestone in U.S. race relations, campaign talk was also shot through with open gender conflict and sublimated class conflict, both on the levels of style and content. And in the race between style and content, style won the election handily in volley after volley of half-truths, anecdotes, and competing synecdoches

Petehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01121927810298726095noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-55524708998996705792008-11-03T06:28:00.004-05:002008-11-03T19:24:26.150-05:00

I am in the midst of several months' fieldwork in Japan, as a result of which I am posting even less frequently than usual.But today being Culture Day, I took the day to walk around the grounds of Meiji Jingu. While wandering in the inner gardens, thoughts regarding the place of rice in Japanese society came unbidden to my mind (probably right around lunchtime). Many Japanese people regard

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-55547972781753061022008-10-09T10:27:00.005-05:002008-10-09T11:41:26.463-05:00

BLDGBLOG has a very interesting piece on the treatment of urban versus rural landscapes in US political discourse. Despite the fact that about 83% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, rural areas are frequently evoked as "authentically" American and opposed to "elite" urban areas. BLDGBLOG suggests that a political focus on "authentic" (rural) America is therefore "questionable at best."My

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-6587694494474421272008-10-02T11:22:00.002-05:002008-10-02T11:33:46.754-05:00

Kerim at Savage Minds has a new post expanding on his ideas about cross-cultural miscommunication between US soldiers and Iraqi civilians. He suggests that, contrary to supporters of the military's Human Terrain System, advice from 'expert' researchers is neither necessary nor always helpful in avoiding miscommunication. (My comments on Kerim's earlier post are here.)

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-21393139294133573922008-09-11T10:53:00.003-05:002008-09-11T11:25:04.449-05:00

Even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together--that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37839214.post-20179765432242769332008-09-08T10:15:00.003-05:002008-09-08T10:46:28.119-05:00

Eric Baković has a post on Language Log that expands a piece from The Daily Show exploring former Republican strategist Karl Rove's defense of Sarah Palin, and his very similar critique of Tim Kaine. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, is a first-term governor and former mayor; Kaine, who was thought to be a potential Democratic vice-presidential candidate, is also a first-term

Chad Nilephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01274981917103523224noreply@blogger.com0