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Linguistic Anthropology
Intended for courses in Linguistics. This long-awaited revision of a best-selling classic text in the area of linguistic anthropology provides authoritative coverage of the origin of language and languages, the descriptive study of language, language acquisition, and the impact of variables such as history, culture, gender, and ethnicity on language.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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October 1, 2011
Material about human evolution and the necessity of the pharynx's development to human language at the beginning was fascinating. Love the exploration of how languages change through time through movement, conquest, etc. The idea that bees have a language to communicate how far a food source is and that there are different dialects for that in different parts of the world is amazing. The book gets confusing when it gets to the development of syntactic stucture, and totally loses me when it focuses, seemingly arbitrarily, on the Lokono language. A very interesting subject, and I'm glad the book is honest about what we can't know. I'm glad I never had to use this as a textbook though because the second half is often unclear.
Displaying 1 of 1 review