Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages

So pleased to be able to save off the new price for a book I will use for a semester! Book arrived quickly and as described!

There was a fascinating little section of this book that was an eye opener for me. Take a phrase with a gender ambiguous word like "The clerk opened his book". Clerk is singular and could be male or female. Textbooks on English grammar say that you should choose the male singular word "his", as done above, when the gender of the noun is unclear (since English has no explicit genders for most nouns). A bit sexist, surely. So some people might say instead "The clerk opened her book". In either case, it makes sense to use a singular word, to match the singular noun. So "The clerk opened their book" is wrong, even if people would often speak that. But this text says that the rule only came to being in the last 2 hundred years. Prior, "The clerk opened their book" was the accepted and correct usage. The text quotes Shakespeare twice, which is pretty definitive. Crikey! So common vernacular is correct by some measure. Alas the book doesn't suggest why the current rule arose. But probably because with the advent of universal education, some attempt was made to impose more logic into English grammar, and the Shakespearean usage is logically inconsistent. I learn something every day. There's a lot in the book, but that was the highlight for me.

This book is fairly easy to read, using data from many languages to illustrate key concepts relating to language and culture. Most linguistics books are full of technical language, and this one is no exception...people new to the study of language may find it helpful to have a textbook (or Wikipedia) on hand for reference. But it isn't as dense as some books I've read for undergrad courses, so I thought it was a nice break from the heavier stuff while still providing a good overview of the field

Nancy Bonvillain is one of the top anthropological linguists in America. This is one of the best text books on the subject that's ever been written. It includes clear explanations and excellent cross-cultural examples. It follows the major traditions set by American linguists and anthropologists in the study of language description, language structure, language acquisition, language change, and the ways in which language reflects differences in cultural values, beliefs, and practices cross-culturally. It's a handy book to use in the undergraduate linguistic anthropology course and students enjoy it.