Ethnolinguistics sometimes called cultural linguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies a relationship between the Linguistic communication & the nonlinguistic cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
Ethnosemantics, also called ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology, is a method of ethnographic research and ethnolinguistics that focuses on semantics by examining how people classify words in their language. Ethnosemantics studies the way people tag and classify the cultural, social, and environmental phenomena in their world and analyze the semantic categories these classifications relieve oneself in profile to understand the cultural meanings unhurried the way people describe things in their world.
Ethnosemantics as a method relies on Franz Boas' image of cultural relativity, as alive as the theory of linguistic relativity. The use of cultural relativity in ethnosemantic analysis serves to focus analyses on individual cultures and their own Linguistic communication terms, rather than using ethnosemantics to score overarching theories of culture and how language affects culture.
In format to perform ethnosemantic analysis, any of the words in a language that are used for a particular covered are gathered by the researcher and are used to clear a framework of how those words relate to one another. Anthropologists who utilize ethnosemantics to create these models believe that they are a description of how speakers of a particular language think about the topic being described.
For example, in her book The Anthropology of Language: An introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Harriet Ottenheimer uses the concept of plants and how dandelions are categorized to explain how ethnosemantics can be used to inspect the differences in how cultures think approximately certain topics. In her example, Ottenheimer describes how the topic "plants" can be shared up into the two categories "lettuce" and "weeds". Ethnosemantics can assistance anthropologists to discover if a particular culture categorizes "dandelions" as a "lettuce" or a "weed", and using this information can discover something about how that culture thinks about plants.
In one item of Oscar Lewis' La Vida, he includes the transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican woman in which she discusses a prostitute's social world. Using ethnosemantics, the speaker's statements about the people in that social circle and their behavior can be analyzed in order to understand how she perceives and conceptualizes her social world. The first step in this analysis is to identify and map out all of the social categories or social identities the speaker identified. one time the social categories have been mapped, the next steps are to effort to define the precise meaning of used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters category, explore how the speaker describes the relationship of categories, and analyze how she evaluates the characteristics of the people who are grouped in those social categories. The speaker in this example forwarded three basic social categories-- the rich, the law, and the poor-- and characterized those people in the higher categories of "rich" and "law" as bad people. The poor are further divided into those with disreputable positions and those with reputable positions. The speaker characterizes the disreputable poor generally as dishonest and corrupt, but submission herself as one of the few exceptions. This analysis of the speaker's version of her social circle thus enables for an apprehension of how she perceives the world around her and the people in it.
Another method that is used in ethnosemantic analysis is componential analysis. Componential analysis is used to describe the criteria people use to classify concepts by analyzing their semantic features. For example, the word "man" can be analyzed into the semantic atttributes "male," "mature," and "human"; "woman" can be analyzed into "female," "mature," and "human"; "girl" can be analyzed into "female," "immature," and "human"; and "bull" can be analyzed into "male," "mature," and "bovine." By using this method, the attribute of words in a mark can be examined to form hypotheses about the significant meaning and identifying features of words in that category.