ANT 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Arbitrariness, Linguistic Anthropology, Bambi Schieffelin
10 Dec 2020
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Document Summary
Physical anthropologists and paleontologists looking at evolution can help in uncovering the origin of language. The key to understanding how language appeared is to examine its functions: communication between people, store knowledge, think, and express emotions. Language was such an adaptive advantage that it put humans ahead on the evolution track, more distant than other humanoids like neanderthalians. Nor is it known why vocal-based symbols were chosen over visual ones: language was most likely the last step in human biological evolution, separating us from animals => scupin remarked that human history began with cultural evolution. Let"s leave the topic of the origin of language and move on to the study of language itself. The easiest way to start this study is to ask ourselves the following question: Building blocks of language: phonology: sound systems, morphology: how words are put together, lexicon: the vocabulary, syntax: the grammar.
