Language in Culture Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language

Where, indeed, do cultural concepts come from? Whorf was the first to propose a general way of understanding the emergence of cultural concepts, so he will be our main guide as we build on our earlier lectures to see how cultural categories are formed from the confluence of grammatical structure, denotational domains, and the sociocultural practice of using textualized language within broader historical process. We’ll also draw on the work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language as well as examples from the sociocultural anthropology of Stanley Tambiah so as to generate our own account of cultural conceptualization.