93012 - Linguistic Anthropology (1) (Lm)

Learning outcomes

This course provides an introduction to linguistic anthropology—intended as the study of language both as a form of cultural practice and as a tool whereby humans formulate models of social conduct. Students will be exposed to the basics of grammatical and discourse analysis, the examination of communicative practices, the social organization of conversation, the working of language ideologies, the role of linguistic context (indexicality) in discursive activity, the semiotics of the self-presentation, and the performance of collective belonging. Throughout the course, special emphasis will be given to the methodological specificities of linguistic anthropological work, which combines traditional ethnographic methods (such as interviewing and participant-observation) with the use of audio-visual recording and transcription of spontaneous interaction. By learning about how language and other semiotic resources are used across a number of communities in the world, students will gain critical insights into the language/culture interface. By the end of the course, they will achieve a deeper understanding of the role of language in human affairs and of its capacity to formulate and transmit aesthetic values and cultural beliefs.

Course contents

Through a series of readings and ethnographic tasks, students will achieve a new awareness of the role of language in our lives. Far from being a mere device for the transmission of information, language plays an important role in reproducing structures of social inequality and challenging power relations. In order to develop this awareness students will be encouraged to observe how they themselves speak and interact.

Classes will take place in the Second Semester and will start on Wednesday, February 12, 2025.

Attendance is not mandatory, but this course is designed for regular (not intermittent) attendance. Students who want to be eligible to take the exam as "attending students" may miss a maximum of 5 classes out of 15 (any additional absence will result in the loss of "attending student status"). Alternatively, they will be able to take the exam as "non-attending" students. (see instructions below).

Readings/Bibliography

This course entails two different programs/reading lists depending on whether or not the student chooses to attend lectures and participate in classwork. At the beginning of the course ( February 12, 2025) prospective students may decide in which capacity they wish to take the course. In order to qualify as "attending," students have to attend no less than 10 classes out of 15.

 

Students not attending class

• Duranti, Alessandro. Antropologia del linguaggio. Meltemi Editore, 2021. (Chapters 2 and 6 excluded) NB It is imperative that students use the 2021 edition, which significantly departs from the previous one (and currently out of print)

• Duranti, Alessandro "Etnopragmatica. La Forza nel Parlare:, Carocci, Roma, 2007, 153 pp.

• Sapir, Edward e Benjamin L. Whorf. Linguaggio e relatività, a cura di Marco Carassai, Enrico Crucianelli. Castelvecchi, 2017, 144 pp.

• Sapir, Edward. Il Linguaggio: Introduzione alla linguistica. Einaudi, 2007. XXX-228 pp. (Chapters 3 and 8 excluded)

 

 

Students attending class

Attending students will have to study the text book and the course readings package (see below).

 Mandatory readings:

• Duranti, Alessandro. Antropologia del linguaggio. Meltemi Editore, 2021 (Chapters 2 and 10 excluded). NB It is imperative that students use the 2021 edition, which significantly departs from the previous one (and currently out of print).
  Students who prefer to do all their readings in English may alternatively read the original English version of this text book:
  Alessandro, Duranti. Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

• Course readings package in ENGLISH: set of articles or book chapters assigned each week (more details on are provided in the course schedule for attending students, provided at the beginning of the semester). All the course materials for attending students will be made available in the ‘teaching materials’ sections of the website, only accessible to Unibo students with institutional credentials.
  Tentative reading list subject to change and inclusive of optional readings
  

1. Week: Common sense, Breaching experiments and the  Language-Culture nexus Nexus

· Mondada, Lorenza, and Hanna Svensson. "Disruptures of normal appearances in public space: the covid-19 pandemic as a natural breaching situation." The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel (2023).

· Stanley, Steven, et al. "Making something out of nothing: Breaching everyday life by standing still in a public place." The sociological review 68.6 (2020): 1250-1272.

· Duranti, A. 2003. Language as culture in US anthropology: Three paradigms. Current anthropology, 44(3), 323-347.

· Silverstein, Michael. "“Cultural” concepts and the language-culture nexus." Current anthropology 45.5 (2004): 621-652.

· Chau, Adam Yuet. "Culinary subjectification: The translated world of menus and orders." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.2 (2014): 141-160.

2. Week: Research Methods, Transcription, and Phenomenological Reduction 

· Ochs, Elinor. 1979. "Transcription as theory." In Developmental pragmatics 10(1): 43-72.

· Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. The politics of transcription. Journal of pragmatics, 32(10), 1439-1465.

3. Week: Linguistic ideology and Linguistic Relativity 

· Lucy, A. John. 1997. “Linguistic Relativity.” In Annual Reviews in Anthropology 26(1): 291-312

· Whorf, B. L., 1956, “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”, in J. B. Carroll, a cura, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 134-159.

· Woolard, Kathryn A. 2020. Language ideologies: Encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 1-21

· Barrett, Rusty. "Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant." Language in Society 35.2 (2006): 163-204.

· Reno, Josh. 2012. Technically speaking: On equipping and evaluating “unnatural” language learners. American Anthropologist, 114(3), 406-419.

· Samuels, David. "Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop." (2004): 297-323.

4. Week: Language as Action and Participation

· Kulick, Don. 2001. “No.” In Alessandro Duranti (ed.) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. New York: Blackwell Publishers. Pp. 493-504.

· Ochs, Elinor, and Carolyn Taylor. "The “father knows best” dynamic in dinnertime narratives." Gender articulated. Routledge, 2012. 97-120.

· Philips, Susan U., et al. Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom. 1972. Republished in A. Duranti Linguistic anthropology: A reader. John Wiley & Sons, 2009

5. Week: Political Economy of Language

· Irvine, J. T. (1989). When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy. American ethnologist, 16(2), 248-267.

· Irvine, J. T. (1990). Registering affect: Heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion. Language and the Politics of Emotion, 126-161.

· Gal, Susan. "Language and political economy." Annual Review of anthropology 18 (1989): 345-367.

· Bourdieu, Pierre. "The economics of linguistic exchanges." Social science information 16.6 (1977): 645-668.

Please note that the course readings are exclusively in English. Non-English speaking students, may replace the course reading package with the following two books in Italian:

• Duranti, Alessandro "Etnopragmatica: La Forza nel Parlare.” Carocci, Roma, 2007, 153 pp
  
  
• Ochs, Elinor Linguaggio e cultura: Lo sviluppo delle competenze comunicative. A cura di Alessandra Fasulo, Laura Sterponi. Carocci, 2023, 356 pp.

Suggested/non mandatory text for both attending and non-attending students:

• Duranti, Alessandro, a cura di. Parole chiave su linguaggio e cultura: un lessico per le scienze umane. Meltemi Editore, 2018. Available also in English as:

Duranti, Alessandro (ed.). 2001. Key terms in language and culture. Blackwell Publishers

 

 

 

Teaching methods

The goal of this course is to combine the presentation of the units of analysis of this specific sector of anthropology (e.g., linguistic relativity, cryptotypes and phenotypes, deixis and indexicality, linguistic acts and illocutionary and performative force of utterances, structures of participation, interactional sequences, conversational turns, case grammar, variation, code switching, etc.) with case studies and ethnographic exercises. The course is thus based on a close combination of theoretical lectures, ethnographic exercises, and seminar discussions in order to familiarize students with the specific research methods of linguistic anthropology, which is strongly  based on immersive methods of fieldwork, observation, video recording and analysis of spontaneous interactions, and tends to avoid the use of interviews and questionnaires, the analysis of text corpora and direct elicitation experiments of linguistic data based on speakers' intuitions regarding acceptability judgments.

Teaching methods will be based both on instructor’s lectures and seminar-like discussions/workshops.

Lectures: the instructor will introduce specific topics and relevant scholarly debates, providing relevant ethnographic examples. Students will be encouraged to comment and ask questions.

Seminar discussions and Workshops: Every week a certain amount of time (approx. 2 hours) will be specifically devoted to collective discussions of the weekly readings, the themes exposed during the lectures, and collective workshops based the notes and observations collected by students in response to weekly prompts.

Assessment methods

Students attending class

Students who regularly attend class and participate in classwork will be assessed through an oral exam on the reading list for attending students (see above), as well as on the basis of their participation in the seminar discussions and workshops, held in class during the semester. Attending students will also be expected to turn in 4 short ethnographic tasks in order to experiment with linguistic anthropology distinctive methodology.

 

In order to be eligible for the status of attending student, the maximum of permitted absences is 5.

The exam will entail a series of questions aimed at assessing the student’s knowledge of the topics discussed in the assigned readings and in class. Students will be expected to show both their capacity to go into specific details and “capture the larger picture.” Among the elements that concur to the final evaluation there are: detailed knowledge of the readings’ content, property of language, and especially the capacity of establishing connections among the texts and organize the information into complex answers showing expositive and critical skills.

• Proper language and the ability to critically speak about the books' content will lead to a good/excellent final grade
• Acceptable language and the ability to resume the books' content will lead to a sufficient/fair grade.
• Insufficient linguistic proficiency and fragmentary knowledge of the books' content will lead to a failure in passing the exam.

To sign up for the exam, please use the Almaesami website.

 

Students NOT attending class

Students who do not regularly attend class and choose not to engage in classwork will have to sustain an oral exam on the reading list for non-attending students provided above. They will be asked questions aimed at verifying their knowledge of the themes discussed in the texts. Students will be expected to show both their capacity to go into specific details and “capture the larger picture.” The questions will be aimed at testing the students’ ability in exposing with an appropriate language some of the topics tackled by the books, as well as their skills in making connections between different texts in order to build an argument.

· Proper language and the ability to critically speak about the books' content will lead to a good/excellent final grade

· Acceptable language and the ability to summarize the books' content will lead to a sufficient/fair grade.

· Insufficient linguistic proficiency and fragmentary knowledge of the books' content will lead to a failure in passing the exam.

To sign up for the exam, please use the Almaesami website.

During the 2024-2025 academic year, oral exams sessions will be held in the following months

April,

May,

June,

early July,

September,

December,

February

Teaching tools

The instructor will occasionally use audio-visual sources (documentaries, maps and photos)

Students who attend class are requested to subscribe to the following mailing list (“Teachers-students” distribution list) through which they can receive any urgent communications about changes to the timetable or location of the lectures:

aurora.donzelli._Anthropologia_Linguistica

To register: go to https://www.dsa.unibo.it/default.aspx
Go to SDA, log in and look for "teacher-student lists" on the left drop-down list, then write aurora.donzelli.Antropologia_Linguistica and register

 

Students who require specific services and adaptations to teaching activities due to a disability or specific learning disorders (SLD), must first contact the appropriate office: https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en/for-students .

Office hours

See the website of Aurora Donzelli