The term linguistic anthropology reflected Hymes' vision of a future where language would be studied in the context of the situation and relative to the community speaking it.
[4] At the same time, he criticized the cognitivist shift in linguistics heralded by the pioneering work of Noam Chomsky, arguing for an ethnographic focus on language in use.
Rather than prioritizing the technical components of language, third paradigm anthropologists focus on studying culture through the use of linguistic tools.
Linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick has done so in relation to identity, for example, in a series of settings, first in a village called Gapun in northern Papua New Guinea.
In later work, Kulick demonstrates that certain loud speech performances in Brazil called um escândalo, Brazilian travesti (roughly, 'transvestite') sex workers shame clients.
[9] In addition, scholars such as Émile Benveniste,[10] Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall[11] Benjamin Lee,[12] Paul Kockelman,[13] and Stanton Wortham[14] (among many others) have contributed to understandings of identity as "intersubjectivity" by examining the ways it is discursively constructed.
In many societies caregivers hold a child facing outward so as to orient it to a network of kin whom it must learn to recognize early in life.
Schieffelin's more recent research has uncovered the socializing role of pastors and other fairly new Bosavi converts in the Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea community she studies.
[19] In a third example of the current (third) paradigm, since Roman Jakobson's student Michael Silverstein opened the way, there has been an increase in the work done by linguistic anthropologists on the major anthropological theme of ideologies,[20]—in this case "language ideologies", sometimes defined as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world.
"[21] Silverstein has demonstrated that these ideologies are not mere false consciousness but actually influence the evolution of linguistic structures, including the dropping of "thee" and "thou" from everyday English usage.
It is the ideology that people should "really" be monoglot and efficiently targeted toward referential clarity rather than diverting themselves with the messiness of multiple varieties in play at a single time.
[26] More recently, a new line of ideology work is beginning to enter the field of linguistics in relation to heritage languages.
[28] Before that, Indonesianist Joseph Errington, making use of earlier work by Indonesianists not necessarily concerned with language issues per se, brought linguistic anthropological methods (and semiotic theory) to bear on the notion of the exemplary center, the center of political and ritual power from which emanated exemplary behavior.
Within such large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect ritual centers of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-conferring influence on any particular event of discursive interaction with respect to the meanings and significance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it.
"[30] Current approaches to such classic anthropological topics as ritual by linguistic anthropologists emphasize not static linguistic structures but the unfolding in realtime of a "'hypertrophic' set of parallel orders of iconicity and indexicality that seem to cause the ritual to create its own sacred space through what appears, often, to be the magic of textual and nontextual metricalizations, synchronized.
"[30][31] Addressing the broad central concerns of the subfield and drawing from its core theories, many scholars focus on the intersections of language and the particularly salient social constructs of race (and ethnicity), class, and gender (and sexuality).
Major contributors to ethnopoetic theory include Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, and Dell Hymes.
Ethnopoetics is considered a subfield of ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, stylistics, linguistics, and literature and translation studies.
Franz Boas was one of the first anthropologists involved in language documentation within North America and he supported the development of three key materials: 1) grammars, 2) texts, and 3) dictionaries.