ABSTRACT
As students of man in his individual and social behavioural patterns, anthropologists have always considered linguistics as an important subfield of their discipline, and such prominent anthropologists as Boas, Sapir or Kroeber have been pioneers in linguistic research in specific areas. For three decades now, scholars concerned with language from an anthropological perspective have found an appropriate outlet for their views and discussions in the journal Anthropological Linguistics, published by the Anthropology Department of Indiana University at Bloomington, and papers on kinship systems, speech styles and registers, conversational analysis, semantic anthropology, the ethnography of speech, language and culture and related topics have appeared in American Anthropologist, the International Journal of American Linguistics, Language in Society and even the standard strictly linguistic journals. Quoting Malinowski and Sapir, Michael Silverstein (1975:157) defined anthropological linguistics as the study of speech behaviour as it is recognised in society. To account for social behaviour, anthropologists resort to a conceptual system labelled ‘culture’, whereas linguists refer to a conceptual system called ‘grammar’. Both have an, as yet, not quite thoroughly explored psychological foundation, but, as Silverstein points out, ‘both grammar and culture are manifested only in society’. This implies that the anthropological linguist needs to associate the ways of speaking of definite groups with the corresponding cultural factors to get the full meaning of the messages they convey. It also entails the necessity for the linguist to understand fully the ‘function’ of the speech forms whose grammatical patterns he analyses.
