Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009, in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use.
[3][4] As a young Ph.D graduate, Hymes carefully analyzed a corpus, within the publication by Melville Jacobs of the songs and stories of Victoria Howard, developing new approaches to the interpretation of oral narratives.
Even at that young age, Hymes had a reputation as a strong linguist; his dissertation, completed in one year, was a grammar of the Kathlamet language spoken near the mouth of the Columbia and known primarily from Franz Boas’s work at the end of the 19th century.
Hymes was influenced by a number of linguists, anthropologists and sociologists; notably Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Harry Hoijer of the Americanist Tradition; Roman Jakobson and others of the Prague Linguistic Circle; sociologist Erving Goffman and anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell, both his colleagues at Penn; and ethnomethodologists Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.
In his early career Hymes adapted Prague School Functionalism to American Linguistic Anthropology, pioneering the study of the relationship between language and social context.
Together with John Gumperz, Erving Goffman and William Labov, Hymes defined a broad multidisciplinary concern with language in society.
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.
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.
The SPEAKING acronym, described below, was presented as a lighthearted heuristic to aid fieldworkers in their attempt to document and analyze instances of language use, which he termed "speech events".
He articulated other, more technical, often typologically oriented approaches to variation in patterns of language use across speech communities in a series of articles.
[9][10] As a result of discussions primarily with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania, in his later work, Hymes renamed the "ethnography of speaking" 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, and to include nonverbal as well as verbal behavior.
[13] With Erving Goffman he co-edited the series Conduct and Communication for the University of Pennsylvania Press as a way to support research they considered most valuable.
[14] Hymes promoted what he and others call "ethnopoetics", an anthropological method of transcribing and analyzing folklore and oral narrative that pays attention to poetic structures within speech.
that have linguistic if not semantic meaning) omitted in the English translation are essential to understanding how the story is shaped and how repetition defines the structure that the text embodies.
[1] Hymes developed a valuable model to assist the identification and labeling of components of linguistic interaction that was driven by his view that, in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used.