John J. Gumperz
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John J. Gumperz is a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. His research has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.
[edit] Works
John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new activity called "ethnography of communication", which can be put underneath the field of Interactional Sociolinguistics or IS.
Sociolinguistics consists of analysis variation in discourse and researching how the variation affects interpretation and/or how it correlates with culture and social order of the community.
Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the speaker affect the way in which they understand inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs known as contextualisation cues.
