Intended Audience
The Department of Anthropology would like to welcome Professor Ellen Contini-Morava, Department of Anthropology/Program in Linguistics, University of Virginia for our Distinguished Scholar Lecture Series. This event is free of charge and open to the public.
Title: Why is a raven like a writing-desk? How and why languages sort the world
Abstract:
Everything in the world is unique, but in order to talk about things we sort them into categories called words. Some languages go farther than that, by sorting words into larger categories called "genders" or "noun classes", or referring to things with special words called "classifiers". I will illustrate a few of these from languages like German, Swahili, Menominee (Algonquian), Mandarin Chinese, and American Sign Language, showing some of the bases for classification (like gender, shape, size, and culturally-specific associations), and I will talk about what communicative work these classification systems do. For example, metaphors of gender can be used to create new words, noun class markers help identify what is being talked about, choice of classifier can express a speaker's attitude about the referent, and they can be used as a form of verbal art.