Syllabus: Language and Human Experience

Abstract

Whether they know it or not, everyone is interested in linguistic anthropology. Comments such as “People from Philadelphia talk funny,” “I didn’t understand the point of that story,” or “How was I supposed to know you were kidding?” are the kind of casual remarks that come up in day-to-day conversation, but behind each of them is an implicit theory about the way language and culture are connected – that a way of talking is connected with a geographical location, for example, or that a good story should have an identifiable “point.” As participants in the social world, each of us does this kind of theorizing all day, every day, but social scientists have developed theories and methodologies that allow us to conduct more principled investigations into questions such as “What does it mean when people from a given social group use a certain pronunciation?” “What counts as a ‘good’ story in this social setting?” and “What cues do people give to signal that they’re not intending to be taken literally?” The goal of this course is to engage with foundational thinking in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and to involve students both in communicating these ideas to a broader public and in using them for original analysis. We will begin by constructing a “tool kit” of core ideas, and then use those ideas to support our study of key topics. In parallel with this survey, students will work together to update a relevant Wikipedia article with citations they will find from the scholarly literature. Later in the semester, the class will identify a few sources of linguistic data, and students will participate in data analysis and write up research reports.