Language, Culture and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (review)

According to the blurb on the back cover, this book ‘continues to address the full spectrum of fundamental topics in linguistic anthropology’. Of the thirteen chapters, Chs. 4 and 5 deal with basic linguistics rather than linguistic anthropology. The first of these, on phonology (70–93), deals with articulatory phonetics, the phonemes of English, junctures, the four tones of Mandarin, and so on. One of the phonemic problems is on stress differences in Araucanian, said to be ‘a language spoken by native Americans of Argentina and Chile’ (92). According to the International encyclopedia of linguistics(ed. by William Bright, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, vol. 1, p. 102), Araucanian is the name of a language family with two surviving languages: Huilliche and Mapudungan.

Ch. 5 covers morphology and syntax (94–113), with the ubiquitous morphemes and allomorphs, morphophonemics, and transformational rules. The latter subject is outdated, with mention of three of Chomsky’s books in the references (111), the latest of which is Language and mind(New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1972). Transformational syntax has, needless to say, changed considerably over the past three decades. That it is not germane to linguistic anthropology may even be seen in the author’s own words: ‘transformational-generative grammar is not a tool that most linguistic anthropologists are able to use or would profit from using’ (109).

The remaining chapters deal with the topic at hand. S stresses that he prefers the term linguistic anthropologyto anthropological linguistics, although he points to the existence of the ‘respected journal’ Anthropological Linguistics(3). Most linguists regard these designations as synonymous.

The first three chapters consider the core of the subject matter: linguistic fieldwork, animal communication systems, language acquisition, language and the brain, Charles F. Hockett’s well-known ‘design features’, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and ethnoscience. One major weak point observable here (and in the volume as a whole) is that it has not been sufficiently updated. The references contain only a handful of publications after 1994 (315–36). As an illustration, consider that much more work has been done on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than the conclu sions offered by John B. Carroll in 1963 (and quoted extensively on pp. 60 and 68).

Chs. 6 and 7 discuss language origins and historical linguistics. Chs. 8–10 cover sociolinguistics, while Ch. 11 is devoted to nonverbal communication (paralanguage, kinesics, and proxemics) and grammatology. The final two chapters are on oral folklore, intercultural communication, and language planning.

There are a number of notable errors. S’s assertion that chimpanzees and gorillas ‘use (these) signs with a degree of originality’ (131) has been thoroughly discredited. Nostraticis said to have been invented in 1964 in the Soviet Union (161). It was already used by Holger Pedersen in 1903, and its first occurrence probably goes back to N. Anderson in 1879 (see my article, ‘The current state of Nostratic linguistics’, Nostratic: Examining a linguistic macrofamily, Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeology, 1999, p. 329). Diglossia is characterized as having a colloquial variety ‘typically learned first’ (176), whereas a more accurate wording would be ‘always learned first’. Further, Charles A. Ferguson did not coin the term diglossia(196). It had already been used by William Marçais in 1930 (‘La diglossie arabe’, L’enseignement public97.401–9). In addition to Afroasiatic languages being spoken in ‘northern Africa and southwestern Asia’, S should have included central and east Africa (193).