Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Dell Hymes
Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, Portland, Oregon November 13, 2009, Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.
Dell Hymes across speech communities in series of articles. More recently, the ethnography of speaking has been renamed the "ethnography of communication" to reflect the broadening of focus from instances of language production to the ways in which communication (including oral, written, broadcast, acts of receiving/listening) is conventionalized in a given community of users. Together with John Gumperz, Erving Goffman and William Labov, Hymes defined a broad multidisciplinary concern with language in society. Hymes' later work focuses on poetics, particularly the poetic organization of Native American oral narratives. He and Dennis Tedlock defined ethnopoetics as a field of study within linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. Hymes considers literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence on this latter work, saying, My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else.[3] Hymes studied with Burke in the 1950s. Burke's work was theoretically and topically diverse, but the idea that seems most influential on Hymes is the application of rhetorical criticism to poetry. Hymes has included many other literary figures and critics among his influences, including Robert Alter, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Kroeber, Claude Lvi-Strauss.[4]
Dell Hymes
Participants
Speaker and audience. Linguists will make distinctions within these categories; for example, the audience can be distinguished as addressees and other hearers.[11] At the family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not addressed, might also hear the narrative.
Ends
Purposes, goals, and outcomes.[12] The aunt may tell a story about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honor the grandmother.
Act Sequence
Form and order of the event. The aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt. Possibly there would be a collaborative interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity.
Key
Clues that establish the "tone, manner, or spirit" of the speech act.[13] The aunt might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the group in a serious voice emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story expresses.
Instrumentalities
Forms and styles of speech.[14] The aunt might speak in a casual register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register and careful grammatically "standard" forms.
Norms
Social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction. In a playful story by the aunt, the norms might allow many audience interruptions and collaboration, or possibly those interruptions might be limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms.
Dell Hymes
Genre
The kind of speech act or event; for the example used here, the kind of story. The aunt might tell a character anecdote about the grandmother for entertainment, or an exemplum as moral instruction. Different disciplines develop terms for kinds of speech acts, and speech communities sometimes have their own terms for types.[15]
References
[1] A fellow folklore graduate student at Indiana was his former Reed classmate, the poet Gary Snyder [2] Sally A. Downey, Dell Hathaway Hymes, 82, Penn education dean (http:/ / www. philly. com/ philly/ obituaries/ 20091119_Dell_Hathaway_Hymes__82__Penn_education_dean. html) philly.com. Retrieved on November 19, 2009. [3] Hymes (2003), p.x. [4] Hymes (2003), pp.ix-x. [5] He also had to master the grammars of several Native American languages in the process, and was probably the last person who could recite texts in Clackamas Chinook, an extinct language. [6] Dell Hymes. 1997. Language in Society. In The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections, ed. by Christina Bratt Paulston and G. Richard Tucker, pp. 243-245. Dallas: SIL International. [7] Hymes (1974), p.53-62. [8] Note that the categories are simply listed in the order demanded by the mnemonic, not by importance [9] Hymes (1974), p.55. [10] Hymes (1974), pp.55-56. [11] Hymes (1974), pp.54 and 56. [12] Hymes (1974), pp.56-57. [13] Hymes (1974), p.57. [14] Hymes (1974), pp.58-60. [15] Anticipating that he might be accused of creating an (English language) "ethnocentric" mnemonic and, thus, by implication, an (English language) "ethnocentric" theory Hymes comments that he could have, for instance, generated a French language mnemonic of P-A-R-L-A-N-T: namely, participants, actes, raison (resultat), locale, agents (instrumentalities), normes, ton (key), types (genres) (1974, p.62).
External links
Dell Hymes' personal web site (http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/dhymes.html)
Major works
Hymes, D., "The Ethnography of Speaking", pp.1353 in Gladwin, T. & Sturtevant, W.C. (eds), Anthropology and Human Behavior, The Anthropology Society of Washington, (Washington), 1962. (1964) Language in Culture and Society (ed.) (1972) Reinventing Anthropology (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (1980) Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays (1981) "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (1983) Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice (2003) Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics
Dell Hymes
Other sources
Darnell, Regna (2006) "Keeping the Faith: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography, Ethnohistory, and Psychology." In: New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, ed. by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, pp.316. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/