Language and Culture

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course follows major themes and thinkers in the development of the study of language and culture in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Philosophy. The course explores the form of language as abstract structure and as practical mechanism of human communication. The course asks how linguistic forms as signs come to be meaningful in thought and in conversation. This requires attention to the principled study of signs at large: semiotics. A running current of investigation in this course is the role of semiotic theory in posing and answering questions about the connections between grammar and cognition, language diversity and cultural difference, and the production of social meaning in interaction. We ask how the anthropological study of meaning contributes to knowledge about what sorts of things are universal and what might be variable in language(s), culture(s), and mind(s). We read and discuss anthropological analysis of empirical data showing how people in different cultures using different languages actually speak. This application yields important insights into the thought and life-worlds of others and of ourselves.