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Short Description: "The unit of the descriptive linguist is a speech community" (Greenberg 1948: 29 ). Greenberg, J. (1948). "Linguistics and Ethnology," in D. Hymes (ed. ...
Content Inside: Greenberg (1948) on ethnology and linguistics
Monday, September 24, 2007 6:39 PM
"The unit of the descriptive linguist is a speech community" (Greenberg 1948: 29). Greenberg, J. (1948). "Linguistics and Ethnology," in D. Hymes (ed.) Language in Culture and Society. (1964). Harper and Row, New York: 27-35. This paper is part of a course packet meant to emphasize early work in linguistics that informs the discipline of sociolinguistics.
Summary
I think Greenberg wants to use this paper as an occasion to show "the richness of language and the diversity of viewpoints from which it can be approached" (Greenberg 1948: 31). Linguistic and "extralinguistic" parts of culture are connected in a host of ways. Greenberg follows Morris (1938) in dividing language into: Pragmatic (if we include the user of the sign in our analyses; of great interest to the ethnologist, but only marginally interesting to the linguist, says Greenberg) Semantic (if we ditch the user, but focus on their expressions and the designations; of great interest to the ethnologist) Syntactic (if we ditch the user and the "designata" and focus on the relations of the expressions; not very interesting to the ethnologist; supposedly it "reflects nothing of the rest of culture and is inherently selfcontained" (Greenberg (1948:29)).) Notice something about the pragmatics here. Linguists are seen as wanting to get at language beyond a particular speaker, but particular verbal behavior is interesting to the ethnologist, though they tend to only get the main things: greetings and farewells, the patterns of sermons, etc. The ethnologist is also more interested in the statements community members make about the language itself (and how they say people use language in specific contexts--especially if what people say they do isn't actually what they do). Greenberg is essentially making a matrix of the field of language with 18 possibilities: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic Individual, cultural, social (I don't think he does a good job distinguishing cultural and social-anyone want to help me out here?) JRR says that cultural probably has religious, whereas social would have class; thus anthropology vs. sociology. Diachronic, synchronic Some things Greenberg thinks could be of interest to
Definitions and examples
Ethnology: Greenberg calls it "the science of culture". Wikipedia points out that where ethnographers document a single group, ethnologists compare different groups. Lvi-Strauss, the Grimm brothers, and Malinowski are considered scholars of ethnology.
Semiotics: How is meaning constructed and understood? Semioticians look at signs or sign systems to do this. Greenberg says that they tend to use logical methods.
Lexicon: Greenberg says this is conveniently where syntacticians put all the semantic aspects, so each morpheme and construction are assigned a meaning. It's straight-forward to get your own language's lexicon, says Greenberg, but you have to do ethnography to get a different culture's.
Background
At the start, it sounds like Greenberg wants to connect linguistics better to semiotics (heretofore, he says, the links have been stronger between linguistics and cultural anthropologists even though linguistics is clearly interested in sign behavior that semioticians study). As he continues, however, it seems to emerge that cultural anthropologists complain about linguistics being rather useless. This is probably because, as Greenberg says, linguists tend to be structurallyoriented and prefer the syntactic dimensions. They try to strip meaning out of the equation and use logical forms to do so. This, to my mind, is a bit of a contradiction. Is Greenberg really just saying that linguistics isn't correctly connected to cultural anthropology or semiotics?
In the last paragraph, Greenberg is essentially saying that ethnologists often just use language as an important tool, but they can do more than just get content and more than even using speech as a verbal behavior that is itself revealing of something. They can "penetrate into the workshop of the linguist" to understand the technical processes. Thus, while Greenberg starts with the relationship of linguistics to other fields, he ends with telling ethnologists (and I
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