IResearchNet
Benjamin Lee Whorf was a chemical engineer, a linguist, and an anthropologist. He pursued his interest in anthropology and linguistics as an avocation. While working as a fire prevention engineer (inspector), he developed an interest in linguistics, pursued in off hours and on business trips. Through his initial independent research and his later collaboration with […]
Washoe is a female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) known for bringing insight into animal cognition, communication, and social complexity with her capacity for communicating via American Sign Language (ASL). Washoe was born in West Africa in 1965. It is suspected that she was taken to animal dealers after her mother was killed by hunters. Washoe […]
The term language universal refers to those features or properties of language that are common to all languages. The notion that languages might share universal features creates a tension of sorts with conceptions of language, as developed by Boas and other early linguistic anthropologists, that held that languages (along with their respective cultures) were infinitely […]
The universals in culture, which is part of the academic field known as the humanities, cannot be defined in a simple statement. The universals are the cumulative artistic and intellectual achievements of humanity. They are a body of work created by those who have been singled out for special praise, extraordinary achievers of whom all […]
In its simplest definition, a symbol is a thing or action that represents another thing or action, and anthropologists agree that symboling is the unique cognitive capacity that allows advanced primates to have culture and to communicate their cultural concepts. Although they are used as synonyms, as verbs “symbolize” and “symbol” differ: to symbolize means […]
