Approaches in Anthropological Linguistics

Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Between Whorf's (+1941) and Sapir's (+1939) death and the reprinting of some of their writings in 1949 there was a hiatus in research that linked language to culture. In the 1950s and 1960s the Relativity Hypothesis played a crucial role in the growing research on the importance of language in human psychological and social functioning but there was just a small amount of empirical research.

Anthropological linguists refer to a "four field"-study of human beings that contains the following fields :

- Physical Anthropology

- Archeology (for investigation of historic and prehistoric languages and their cultural surroundings i.e. Indo-European Languages)

- Socio-Cultural Anthropology

- Linguistic Anthropology

First fieldworks were done in linguistically oriented case studies and on the investigation of single languages concerning their associations to culture or cultural modes of thought.

This work focuses on the invention of anthropological linguists, its predominant scholars and their theories und suppositions.