Defining Structures: Taxonomies and Componential Paradigms

Abstract

Abstract The original aim of the linguistic anthropologists who developed ethnoscience in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to apply advanced linguistic methodology to the study of culture. Ethnoscientists began this application with semantics, because it was part of both language and culture. As the part of culture directly present in conversation, semantics provided a relatively easy linguistic entry point to the study of culture. In its linguistics aspect, ethnoscience was a natural extension of structural linguistics. Its descriptive methodology came from American structuralism, while its analytic meth odology“ componential analysis—came from Prague phonology {the only genuinely analytic device anyone in linguistics then had). But both schools of structuralist linguistics shared a focus on signifiers (as opposed to signifieds); members of both schools commonly conveyed a sense that semantics was too complex, too hard to study, and too enmeshed in psychology to be dealt with in any formal manner by contemporary linguistics, even if they held out hope for future advances. Since culture includes both the phenomenal entities-the “;stuff’-speakers use language to refer to and the meanings speakers use language to convey, anthropology’s focus on culture ensured that ethnoscience, as a part of anthropology, would have to deal squarely and primarily with meaning in language. It is interesting to note that, by virtue of this focus on meaning, ethnoscience came closer to implementing the Saussurean program than had any of the linguistics that preceded it.