Dell Hymes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dell Hathaway Hymes (born June 7, 1927 in Portland, Oregon) is a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work has dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics." The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what by that time was already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics).

He was educated at Reed College, studying under David H. French, and graduated in 1950 after a stint in pre-war Korea. His work in the Army as a decoder is part of what influenced him to become a linguist. Hymes earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1955,^[1] and took a job at Harvard University.

Even at that young age, Hymes had a reputation as a strong linguist; his dissertation, completed in one year, was a grammar of the Kathlamet language spoken near the mouth of the Columbia and known primarily from Franz Boas’s work at the end of the 19th century.

Hymes remained at Harvard for five years, leaving in 1960 to join the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He spent five years at Berkeley as well, and then joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 (where he succeeded A. Irving Hallowell). In 1972 he joined the Department of Folklore and Folklife and became Dean of Graduate Studies in Education in 1975.

He has been President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, the American Anthropological Association in 1983, and the American Folklore Society - the last person to have held all three positions. While at Penn, Hymes was a founder of the journal Language in Society. Hymes later joined the Departments of Anthropology and English at the University of Virginia, where he became the Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology and English, and from which he recently retired. He is now emeritus faculty.

His wife, Virginia Hymes, is also a sociolinguist and folklorist.

Contents 1 Influences on his work 2 Significance of his work 3 The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model 3.1 Setting and Scene 3.2 Participants 3.3 Ends 3.4 Act Sequence 3.5 Key 3.6 Instrumentalities 3.7 Norms 3.8 Genre 4 Notes 5 External links 6 Major works 7 Other sources

[edit] Influences on his work

Hymes was influenced by a number of linguists who came before him, notably Boas and Edward Sapir.

Hymes believes that there was a critical connection between language and ways of thinking. This is the crux of his theoretical position. Hymes considers literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence, saying, “My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else”.^[2] Hymes studied with Burke the 1950s. Burke's work was theoretically and topically diverse, but the idea that seems most influential on Hymes is the application of rhetorical criticism to poetry.

Hymes has included many other literary figures and critics among his influences, including Robert Alter, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Harry Hoijer.^[3]

[edit] Significance of his work

As one of the first sociolinguists, Hymes helped to pioneer the connection between speech and human relations and human understandings of the world. Hymes is particularly interested in how different language patterns shape different patterns of thought.

Hymes is a proponent of what he and others call “ethnopoetics,” an anthropological method of transcribing and analyzing folklore and oral narrative that pays attention to poetic structures within speech. In reading the transcriptions of Indian myths, for example, which were generally recorded as prose by the anthropologists who came before, Hymes noticed that there are commonly poetic structures in the wording and structuring of the tale.^[4] Patterns of words and word use follow patterned, artistic forms.

Hymes’ goal, in his own mind, is to understand the artistry and “the competence… that underlies and informs such narratives” (Hymes 2003:vii). In fact, he created the Dell Hymes Model of Speaking and coined the term communicative competence within language education.

In addition to being entertaining stories or important myths about the nature of the world, narratives also convey the importance of aboriginal environmental management knowledge such as fish spawning cycles in local rivers or the disappearance of grizzly bears from Oregon. Hymes believes that all narratives in the world are organized around implicit principles of form which convey important knowledge and ways of thinking and of viewing the world. He argues that understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, in which he includes ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatics, narrative inquiry and literary criticism.

Hymes clearly considers folklore and narrative a vital part of the fields of linguistics, anthropology and literature, and has bemoaned the fact that so few scholars in those fields are willing and able to adequately include folklore in its original language in their considerations (Hymes 1981:6-7). He feels that the translated versions of the stories are inadequate for understanding their role in the social or mental system in which they existed. He provides an example that in Navajo, the particles (utterances such as "uh," "So," "Well," etc. that have linguistic if not semantic meaning), omitted in the English translation, are essential to understanding how the story is shaped and how repetition defines the structure — in the Lévi-Straussian sense — that the text embodies.

[edit] The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model

Hymes developed a valuable model to assist the identification and labeling of components of linguistic interaction that was driven by his view that, in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used.

The model was comprised of sixteen components that can be applied to many sorts of discourse: message form; message content; setting; scene; speaker/sender; addressor; hearer/receiver/audience; addressee; purposes (outcomes); purposes (goals); key; channels; forms of speech; norms of interaction; norms of interpretation; and genres.^[5]

To facilitate the application of his representation, Hymes constructed the acronym, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, under which he grouped the sixteen components within eight divisions:^[6]

[edit] Setting and Scene

"Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances".^[7] The living room in the grandparents' home might be a setting for a family story. Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness.^[8] The family story may be told at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary. At times, the family would be festive and playful; at other times, serious and commemorative.

[edit] Participants

Speaker and audience. Linguists will make distinctions within these categories; for example, the audience can be distinguished as addressees and other hearers.^[9] At the family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not addressed, might also hear the narrative.

[edit] Ends

Purposes, goals, and outcomes.^[10] The aunt may tell a story about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honor the grandmother.

[edit] Act Sequence

Form and order of the event. The aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt. Possibly there would be a collaborative interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity.

[edit] Key

Clues that establish the "tone, manner, or spirit" of the speech act.^[11] The aunt might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the group in a serious voice emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story expresses.

[edit] Instrumentalities

Forms and styles of speech.^[12] The aunt might speak in a casual register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register and careful grammatically "standard" forms.

[edit] Norms

Social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction. In a playful story by the aunt, the norms might allow many audience interruptions and collaboration, or possibly those interruptions might be limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms.

[edit] Genre

The kind of speech act or event; for our course, the kind of story. The aunt might tell a character anecdote about the grandmother for entertainment, or an exemplum as moral instruction. Different disciplines develop terms for kinds of speech acts, and speech communities sometimes have their own terms for types.^[13]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ A fellow folklore graduate student at Indiana was his former Reed classmate, the poet Gary Snyder
2. ^ Hymes (2003), p.x.
3. ^ Hymes (2003), pp.ix-x.
4. ^ He also had to master the grammars of several Native American languages in the process, and is probably the last person alive who can recite texts in Clackamas Chinook, an extinct language.
5. ^ Hymes (1974), p.53-62.
6. ^ Note that the categories are simply listed in the order demanded by the mnemonic, not by importance
7. ^ Hymes (1974), p.55.
8. ^ Hymes (1974), pp.55-56.
9. ^ Hymes (1974), pp.54 and 56.
10. ^ Hymes (1974), pp.56-57.
11. ^ Hymes (1974), p.57.
12. ^ Hymes (1974), pp.58-60.
13. ^ Anticipating that he might be accused of creating an (English language) "ethnocentric" mnemonic — and, thus, by implication, an (English language) "ethnocentric" theory — Hymes comments that he could have, for instance, generated a French language mnemonic of P-A-R-L-A-N-T: namely, participants, actes, raison (resultat), locale, agents (instrumentalities), normes, to (key), types (genres) (1974, p.62).

[edit] External links

• Dell Hymes' personal web site

[edit] Major works

• Hymes, D., "The Ethnography of Speaking", pp.13-53 in Gladwin, T. & Sturtevant, W.C. (eds), Anthropology and Human Behavior, The Anthropology Society of Washington, (Washington), 1962.
• (1964) Language in Culture and Society
• (ed.) (1972) Reinventing Anthropology
• (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach
• (1980) Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays
• (1981) "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• (1983) Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology
• (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice
• (2003) Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics

[edit] Other sources

• Darnell, Regna (2006) "Keeping the Faith: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography, Ethnohistory, and Psychology." In: New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, ed. by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, pp. 3-16. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.