ANTH 2020 Visual Languages Across Cultures

ANTH 2020 Visual Languages Across Cultures
Visual Languages Across Cultures
Most research on language takes speech as the main domain of investigation. However, humans use not only speech but also meaningful hand movements called 'gestures' when they communicate. Furthermore,there are many communities where the speech is absent in linguistic communication. For example, deaf communities across the world use sign languages that are produced and perceived only in the visual-spatial modality. This course aims to give n interdisciplinary and state of the art overview of the role of the body in the structuring and functioning of the human language faculty. The course will present cross-cultural and cross-linguistic findings from these new fields relating them to discussions of embodied cognition and semantics, situated use of language, the link between language and action and their neural correlates. This course fullfills the departmental goal of providing its students with the knowledge of appreciation for the cultural and linguistic diversity of humanity.
credit hours: 3