Methods of Linguistic Anthropology

What linguistic anthropology is concerned with are the consequences of the process that led to language. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The term does not refer to the study of a particular language or languages for the purpose of learning to speak them; rather, it refers to the analytical study of language, any language, to reveal its structure and the rules according to which these units are put together to produce stretches of speech. The classic structuralist paradigm dominated linguistics for the first half of the twentieth century until the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar largely replaced it. Boas saw linguistics as a tool for cultural and historical analysis, and, indeed, a necessary component of the kind of “salvage linguistics” and “salvage anthropology” he felt was also a mission of the new fledgling field. Research concerning the cultures and languages of contemporary societies is for the most part conducted in the field.