Anthropological Linguistics An Introduction

This is a textbook for courses in language and culture for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. It starts from a theoretical viewpoint of both language and culture as conventionalized forms of situated practice and uses this as a unifying framework to cover the full range of topics normally treated under the rubric of language and culture. An important orientating strand in the book is the tension between innatist or universalist versus relativist approaches to anthropological linguistic phenomena: various topics like kinship, color, classifiers or the effects of literacy are discussed from these contrasting viewpoints to provide a richer understanding of their implications. The book is organized so that in a modular way individual instructors may use or omit sections to fit into their overall teaching design.

William A. Foley is Professor of Lingusitics at the University of Sydney. He is author of Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar (with R. van Valin) and The Papuan Languages fo New Guinea, and editor of The Role of Theory in Language Description.