"For sheer brilliance Edward Sapir is unsurpassed by any American anthropologist, living or dead."—Cylde Kluckhohn, Harvard University

Sapir was skillfull at analyzing unwritten languages on the basis of his own fieldwork. He contributed significantly to the mapping of languages and cultures of native America.

This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Volume I of Edward Sapir’s Collected Works contains the reedition of Sapir’s papers and reviews in general linguistics, in the philosophy of language and linguistics (the origin of language; general semantics; the construction of an international auxiliary language), as well as his articles on ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ written for the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. The texts have been reedited and supplied with an introductory study and notes. The introductory studies assess Sapir’s contribution to the linguistic study of the various topics dealt with. Volume I also contains a reprint of retrospective appraisals of Sapir’s work in general linguistics written by Zellig Harris and Stanley Newman.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward Sapir (1884–1939), this volume brings together a number of papers by distinguished North American scholars appraising the life and work of the world-renowned anthropologist and linguist. It includes an introduction by the editor, a full bibliography of Sapir's scientific writings, a detailed index of names, and many photographs and fac similes. Among the contributors are: Ruth Benedict, Leonard Bloomfield, Franz Boas, Joseph Greenberg, Mary Haas, Zellig Harris, A.L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, David Mandelbaum, Morris Swadesh, and C.F. Voegelin.

This book examines over 4000 years of culture history of the related Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah peoples on western Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. Using data from the Toquaht Archaeological Project, McMillan challenges current ethnographic interpretations that show little or no change in these peoples’ culture. Instead, by combining historical evidence, recent archaeological data, and oral traditions he demonstrates conclusively that there were in fact extensive cultural changes and restructuring in these societies in the century following contact with Europeans.

No detailed description available for "The Sound Shape of Language".

A highly influential scholar urges that linguistics be studied as part of the entire communicative conduct of social groups and demonstrates the mutual relation between linguistics and other disciplines, such as sociology, social anthropology, and education.

Most studies of gender differences in language use have been undertaken from exclusively either a sociocultural or a biological perspective. By contrast, this innovative volume places the analysis of language and gender in the context of a biocultural framework, examining both cultural and biological sources of gender differences in language, as well as the interaction between them. The first two parts of the volume on cultural variation in gender-differentiated language use, comparing Western English-speaking societies with societies elsewhere in the world. The essays are distinguished by an emphasis on the syntax, rather than style or strategy, of gender-differentiated forms of discourse but also often carry out the same forms differently through different choices of language form. These gender differences are shown to be socially organized, although the essays in Part I also raise the possibility that some cross-cultural similarities in the ways males and females differentially use language may be related to sex-based differences in physical and emotional makeup. Part III examines the relationship between language and the brain and shows that although there are differences between the ways males and females process language in the brain, these do not yield any differences in linguistic competence or language use. Taken as a whole, the essays reveal a great diversity in the cultural construction of gender through language and explicity show that while there is some evidence of the influence of biologically based sex differences on the language of women and men, the influence of culture is far greater, and gender differences in language use are better accounted for in terms of culture than in terms of biology. The collection will appeal widely to anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and other concerned with the understanding of gender roles.