ANTH 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Linguistic Anthropology, Paralanguage, Morpheme

• School: University of Victoria
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 100
• Professor: Erin Mc Guire

Document Summary

Human culture is heavily reliant of communications that allow people to interact with one another in socially meaningful ways through voices, gestures, and written words. Language: symbolic system expressing meaning through sounds or gestures. Through words, we refer to things that are not physically in front of us. There is a huge amount of information that any person must process and produce to fully function fully in human society. Speech: influenced by multiple factors biological, cultural, social, and political. Language is biological in that we use our mouth and throat to produce sound. Socio cultural factors (gender, status, level of education) influence the way we speak and provide additional information. Language is also political because it is bound up in relationships in which power is constantly negotiated. Language shapes culture = by reflecting the changes in society. Nonhuman primates have structures in the brain that are similar (not as developed) to those of humans.