John J. Gumperz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Joseph Gumperz (1922 - ) is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, 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 method called the "ethnography of communication." Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics analyzes variation in discourse, within a particular speech community, and studies how that variation affects the unfolding of meaning in interaction and correlates with the 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 make conversational inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs known as contextualisation cues.
His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Annamalai, E. (1997), “Development of Sociolinguistics in India”, in Paulston, Christina Bratt & Tucker, G. Richard, The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections, Summer Institute of Linguistics, pp. 35-41, ISBN 1-55671-022-4
