Language and Material Culture (IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society)

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. -- Amazon.com Language and Material Culture 2 Editorial page 3 Title page 4 LCC data 5 Dedication page 6 Table of contents 8 List of figures 12 List of tables 14 Acknowledgments 16 Preface 18 1. Introduction: Words for things 20 1.1 Introduction 20 1.1.1 The how 21 1.1.2 The why 22 1.1.3 The where 23 1.2 Dialect geography 25 1.2.1 Wörter und Sachen 28 1.3 The American Linguistic Atlas Project 29 1.4 Maps as theory 32 1.5 Mapping material culture 35 1.6 Plan of the book 39 2. A dual history. In other words: What does this awl mean? 42 2.1 Introduction 42 2.2 A dual history 42 2.2.1 Classification 43 2.2.2 Structuralism 45 2.2.3 Ethnography 48 2.2.4 Processual archaeology 49 2.2.5 Orderly heterogeneity 52 2.2.6 The textual turn 53 2.2.7 The discursive turn 55 2.3 Conclusion 57 3. Complex adaptive systems 60 3.1 Introduction 60 3.1.1 Complexity in nature: The beehive 63 3.1.2 Complexity in the human body: The brain 65 3.1.3 Complexity in human behavior: Improvisational jazz 66 3.2 Language as a complex adaptive system 69 3.3 Complex distributions 74 3.4 Complexity at work: Linguistic Atlas evidence 79 3.4.1 Why so many sofa terms? 80 3.4.2 Scalability 81 3.4.3 Physical history and the A-curve 86 3.4.4 A-curves throughout language data 87 3.4.5 Conclusion 89 4. Material culture as a complex system 90 4.1 Introduction 90 4.2 Houses as complex systems 91 4.3 Glassie’s house grammar 96 4.4 Kempton’s ceramic prototypes 101 4.5 Labov’s category boundaries 109 4.5.1 Prototypes and schemas 111 4.6 Conclusion 112 5. Case study: Pantry 114 5.1 Introduction 114 5.1.1 Linguistic Atlas responses to the ‘pantry’ question 114 5.1.2 Pantry term etymologies 118 5.2 The development of the American pantry 121 5.3 Complex systems and the individual 132 6. Case study: Estate inventories 140 6.1 Introduction 140 6.2 Inventory corpora 142 6.2.1 Room designations 145 6.2.2 Cupboards 148 7. Case study: Historic American building survey 156 7.1 Introduction 156 7.1.1 Items included in a HABS file 157 7.1.2 HABS room designations 160 7.2 HABS commentary 164 7.3 HABS files as emergent texts 165 7.3.1 The George Jacobs House 167 7.3.2 Emergent meaning 172 7.4 Final note on HABS 173 8. Conclusion: On artifacts 174 8.1 Observational artifacts 174 8.2 All the variation 175 8.3 Schemas 176 8.4 Local practice 177 8.5 Question boundaries 178 8.6 Conclusion 179 Appendix A: Complete data sets from Chapter 1 180 Appendix B: Complete data sets from Chapter 3 182 Appendix C: Complete data set from Chapter 4 191 Appendix D: Complete data sets from Chapter 5 193 Appendix E: Complete data sets from Chapter 6 195 Appendix F: Complete data sets from Chapter 7 198 References 202 Index 210