Language and Material Culture
1st Edition
Published on 24. September 2015
XVII, 192 pages
978-90-272-6794-8 (ISBN)
Description
This innovative and provocative work introduces complexity theory and its application to both the study of language and the study of material culture. The book begins with a wide-ranging theoretical background, covering the areas of dialect geography, the anthropological study of material culture, and a general introduction to the study of complex adaptive systems. Following this general introduction, the principles of complexity theory are demonstrated in data drawn from linguistics and material culture studies. Language and Material Culture further highlights the principles of complexity through a series of case studies, using data from the Linguistic Atlas, colonial American inventories and the Historic American Building Survey. LMC shows that language and material culture are intertwined as they interact within the same cultural complex system. The book is designed for students in courses that focus on language variation, American English and material culture, in addition to general courses on applications of complex systems.
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Allison Paige Burkette
Language and Material Culture
Book
09/2015
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€100.70
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Content
- Intro
- Language and Material Culture
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Dedication page
- Table of contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1. Introduction: Words for things
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.1.1 The how
- 1.1.2 The why
- 1.1.3 The where
- 1.2 Dialect geography
- 1.2.1 Wo¨rter und Sachen
- 1.3 The American Linguistic Atlas Project
- 1.4 Maps as theory
- 1.5 Mapping material culture
- 1.6 Plan of the book
- 2. A dual history. In other words: What does this awl mean?
- 2.1 Introduction
- 2.2 A dual history
- 2.2.1 Classification
- 2.2.2 Structuralism
- 2.2.3 Ethnography
- 2.2.4 Processual archaeology
- 2.2.5 Orderly heterogeneity
- 2.2.6 The textual turn
- 2.2.7 The discursive turn
- 2.3 Conclusion
- 3. Complex adaptive systems
- 3.1 Introduction
- 3.1.1 Complexity in nature: The beehive
- 3.1.2 Complexity in the human body: The brain
- 3.1.3 Complexity in human behavior: Improvisational jazz
- 3.2 Language as a complex adaptive system
- 3.3 Complex distributions
- 3.4 Complexity at work: Linguistic Atlas evidence
- 3.4.1 Why so many sofa terms?
- 3.4.2 Scalability
- 3.4.3 Physical history and the A-curve
- 3.4.4 A-curves throughout language data
- 3.4.5 Conclusion
- 4. Material culture as a complex system
- 4.1 Introduction
- 4.2 Houses as complex systems
- 4.3 Glassie's house grammar
- 4.4 Kempton's ceramic prototypes
- 4.5 Labov's category boundaries
- 4.5.1 Prototypes and schemas
- 4.6 Conclusion
- 5. Case study: Pantry
- 5.1 Introduction
- 5.1.1 Linguistic Atlas responses to the 'pantry' question
- 5.1.2 Pantry term etymologies
- 5.2 The development of the American pantry
- 5.3 Complex systems and the individual
- 6. Case study: Estate inventories
- 6.1 Introduction
- 6.2 Inventory corpora
- 6.2.1 Room designations
- 6.2.2 Cupboards
- 7. Case study: Historic American building survey
- 7.1 Introduction
- 7.1.1 Items included in a HABS file
- 7.1.2 HABS room designations
- 7.2 HABS commentary
- 7.3 HABS files as emergent texts
- 7.3.1 The George Jacobs House
- 7.3.2 Emergent meaning
- 7.4 Final note on HABS
- 8. Conclusion: On artifacts
- 8.1 Observational artifacts
- 8.2 All the variation
- 8.3 Schemas
- 8.4 Local practice
- 8.5 Question boundaries
- 8.6 Conclusion
- Appendix A: Complete data sets from Chapter 1
- Appendix B: Complete data sets from Chapter 3
- Appendix C: Complete data set from Chapter 4
- Appendix D: Complete data sets from Chapter 5
- Appendix E: Complete data sets from Chapter 6
- Appendix F: Complete data sets from Chapter 7
- References
- Index
