Etiquettes disciplinaires
Anthropologie linguistique vs. Sociolinguistique

Brève histoire des étiquettes disciplinaires des années 1960 aux années 1980 (Bucholtz and Hall 2008: 402):

The terminological flux that emerged in early programmatic statements is indicative of the simultaneously disciplinary and interdisciplinary orientation of scholars during this era. For instance, in 1964 Hymes proposed the term linguistic anthropology for a field that he defined as ‘the study of language within the context of anthropology’ (1964: xxiii).Yet a decade later, acknowledging that the term had been eclipsed by the more widely used anthropological linguistics, he revised his terminology for pragmatic reasons: ‘ “Sociolinguistics” is the most recent and most common term for an area of research that links linguistics with anthropology’ (Hymes 1974: 83–85). Interestingly, in the original version of the paper on which the 1974 chapter is based, Hymes proposed a broader definition of sociolinguistics as ‘an area of research that links linguistics with anthropology and sociology’ (1971: 47; emphasis added). The elision of sociology as a contributor to sociolinguistics between the 1971 and 1974 versions appears to reflect the growing attention to disciplinary boundaries in this stage of the field’s development.

[Note. Jack Sidnell (personal communication) observes that this shift in Hymes’s view may have been due to two factors: the move of Goffman from sociology at Berkeley to anthropology at the University ofPennsylvania in the early 1970s and the publication of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) paper on turn-taking, which may have made clear to Hymes the difference between the conversation-analytic approach within sociology and his own vision for sociolinguistics.]

The differences between anthropological and linguistic approaches to sociolinguistics were also becoming apparent,with the former seeking to explicate culture through the investigation of speech events (e.g. Hymes 1974) and interactional practices (e.g. Gumperz 1982) and the latter largely drawing on social information to illuminate issues of linguistic structure, variation, and change. By the mid 1980s, sociolinguistics did not necessarily refer to the broad field originally conceptualized by Hymes and others; rather, the term was often used, especially in linguistics departments, to refer to a quantitative approach to language and society.4 At this point, a disciplinary division of labor had emerged whereby statistical analysis was primarily reserved for sociolinguistics (in this new, narrower sense) and ethnographic work was carried out largely (but not entirely) under the rubric of linguistic anthropology; discourse analysis of various kinds was part of both fields, but it also retained a separate status as a subspecialty of linguistics that did not necessarily focus on sociocultural aspects of discourse.

 

buchholtz_hall_sociocultural_linguistics.pdf — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 401–431. Rangé dans le dossier 'Woolard (Kathryn A.)' de la bibliothèque numérique (voir ci-dessous).

gumperz_gumperz.pdf — John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Studying language, culture, and society: Sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology?, Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 532–545.

woolard_whyDatNow.pdf — Kathryn A.Woolard, [University of California, San Diego,] “Why dat [vs. that] now?: Linguistic-anthropological contributions to the explanation of sociolinguistic icons and change,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 432–452. Excellent résumé dans Buchholtz et Hall (ci-dessus).

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