ANTH 350 - Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

A set of offerings that prepares students for advanced, self-directed research in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Topics range from language and culture, language and colonialism, language and gender, or linguistic documentation and revitalization to religious and ritual linguistic practices, language and political order, historical linguistics, language and media, or an intensive focus on the languages spoken in a specific region.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2026/27a: Metaphor, Mind & Culture. This course addresses this question through focusing on the study of metaphor, an area of research in semantics that crosscuts not only the fields of linguistics and anthropology, but also philosophy, psychology, history, and English. We explore metaphors and their relationship to language through several additional questions. Does metaphor in language structure the way we understand and reason about the world? How do speakers identify and understand metaphors? Are there universal metaphors across languages, akin to grammatical structures? Does culture influence the kinds of metaphors a language may use? How do speakers creatively employ novel metaphors? This class also emphasizes methodology, as we explore how metaphor researchers identify and analyze metaphor through approaches that include corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, metaphorical creativity, discourse analysis, and metaphor in religion, politics, science, literature, and art. One previous course in anthropology or the social sciences is desirable but not required.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS