Dell Hymes (born 1927 in Portland, Oregon) is a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work has dealt primarily with languagues of the Pacific Northwest. He was educated at Reed College, graduating in 1950 after a stint in the Korean War. His work in the Army as a decoder is part of what influenced him to become a linguist. Hymes earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1955 and took a job at Harvard University. Even at that young age, Hymes had a reputation as a strong linguist; his dissertation, completed in one year, was a grammar of the Kathlamet language spoken near the mouth of the Columbia and known primarily from Franz Boas’ work at the end of the 19th century. Hymes remained at Harvard for five years, leaving in 1960 to join the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He spent five years at Berkeley as well, and then joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. In 1972 he joined the Department of Folklore and Folklife and became Dean of Graduate Studies in Education in 1975. He has been President of the American Anthropological Association in 1983, and the American Folklore Society - the last person to have held both positions. While at Penn, Hymes was a founder of the journal Language in Society. Hymes later joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he became the Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology, and from which he recently retired. He is now emeritus faculty (Gaalswyk 2001). His wife, Virginia Hymes, is also a sociolinguist and folklorist. 1927 (MCMXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Portland is the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon, and county seat of Multnomah County. ... State nickname: Beaver State Official languages None Capital Salem Largest city Portland Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) Senators Ron Wyden (D) Gordon Smith (R) Area  - Total  - % water Ranked 9th 255,026 km² 2. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... See Anthropology. ... Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore such as fairy tales and folk mythology in oral or non-literary traditions. ... Darker red states are always part of the Pacific Northwest. ... Reed College is a liberal arts college with 1341 students as of the fall of 2004 (45% men and 55% women), located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. ... 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Korean War, from June 25, 1950 to cease-fire on July 27, 1953 (technically speaking, the war has not yet ended), was a conflict between North Korea and South Korea. ... US Army Seal HHC, US Army Distinctive Unit Insignia The Army is the branch of the United States armed forces that has primary responsibility for land-based military operations. ... A decoder is a device which does the reverse of an encoder, undoing the encoding so that the original information can be retrieved. ... The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ... Indiana University, technically founded in 1820, is an eight-campus university system in the state of Indiana. ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. ... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... Look up Faculty on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Faculty has several different meanings and can refer to: University faculty are the instructors and/or researchers of high standing at universities, as opposed to the students or support staff. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, humane) consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo). ... The University of Pennsylvania (Penn is the moniker used by the university itself; UPenn is also common) is a private, nonsectarian, research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (link goes to calendar). ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ... In an educational setting, a dean is a person with significant authority . ... 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... American Anthropological Association (AAA) was founded in 1902 and claims to be, the worlds largest professional organization of individuals interested in anthropology. Although there were several other American anthropological societies in existence at the turn of the 20th century, this new, national organization was formed to promote the science... The American Folklore Society is the scholarly association of all folklorists in the United States. ... Academic publishing describes a system of publishing that is necessary in order for academic scholars to review work and make it available for a wider audience. ... Website Virginia. ... Emeritus is a title given to a retired professor, bishop or other professional. ...

Influences on his work

Hymes was influenced by a number of linguists who came before him, notably Boas and Edward Sapir. Hymes believes that there was a critical connection between language and ways of thinking. This is the crux of his theoretical position. Hymes considers literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence, saying, “My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else” (Hymes 2003:x). Hymes studied with Burke the 1950s. Burke's work was theoretically and topically diverse, but the idea that seems most influential on Hymes is the application of rhetorical criticism to poetry. Hymes has included many other literary figures and critics among his influences, including Robert Alter, C.S. Lewis, A.L. Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Harry Hoijer (Hymes 2003:ix-x). Edward Sapir. ... Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. ... Robert Alter is a Biblical scholar, and a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. ... Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was an author and scholar. ... Alfred Louis Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876–October 5, 1960) was one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. ... Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908) is a French anthropologist who became one of the twentieth centurys greatest intellectuals by developing structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. ... Harry Hoijer (1904-1976) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. ...

Significance of his work

As a sociolinguist, Hymes is therefore interested in the connection between speech and human relations and human understandings of the world. Hymes is particularly interested in how different language patterns shape different patterns of thought, which puts him very much at odds with the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. Hymes is a proponent of what he and others call “ethnopoetics,” an anthropological method of transcribing and analyzing folklore and oral narrative that pays attention to poetic structures within speech. In reading the transcriptions of Indian myths, for example, which were generally recorded as prose by the anthropologists who came before, Hymes noticed that there are commonly poetic structures in the wording and structuring of the tale. (He also had to master the grammars of several Native American languages in the process, and is probably the last person alive who can recite texts in Clackamas Chinook, an extinct language.) Patterns of words and word use follow patterned, artistic forms. Hymes’ goal, in his own mind, is to understand the artistry and “the competence… that underlies and informs such narratives” (Hymes 2003:vii). In addition to being entertaining stories or important myths about the nature of the world, narratives also convey important practical information such as knowledge of fish in the local rivers and the disappearance of grizzly bears from Oregon. Hymes believes (2003:vii-x) that all narratives in the world are organized around implicit principles of form which convey important knowledge and ways of thinking and of viewing the world. He (2003:viii) argues that understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, in which he includes ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatics, narrative inquiry and literary criticism. One might be looking for the academic discipline of communications. ... Though human resources have been part of business and organisations since the first days of agriculture, the modern concept of human resources began in reaction to the efficiency focus of Taylorism in the early 1900s. ... Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Ethnopoetics refers to poetic traditions which are typically seen as tribal or otherwise ethnic by the West (or indeed between any ethnoculturally different peoples). ... Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken (oral) word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. ... In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Mythology. ... Prose blah blah blahProse generally lacks the formal structure of meter or rhyme that is often found in poetry. ... Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is traditionally a written art form (although there is also an ancient and modern poetry which relies mainly upon oral or pictorial representations) in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... Oregon Penutian is a language family in the Penutian language phylum comprising languages spoken at one time by several groups of Native Americans in present-day western Oregon and western Washington in the United States. ... A competency (in the technical sense used in recent corporate human resources thought) is the cluster of traits (skills, abilities, habits, character traits, knowledge) a person must have in order to perform a job well. ... Groups Conodonta Hyperoartia Petromyzontidae (lampreys) Pteraspidomorphi (early jawless fish) Thelodonti Anaspida Cephalaspidomorphi (early jawless fish) Galeaspida Pituriaspida Osteostraci Gnathostomata (jawed vertebrates) Placodermi Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) Acanthodii Osteichthyes (bony fish) Actinopterygii (ray-finned fish) Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish) Actinistia (coelacanths) Dipnoi (lungfish) A fish is a poikilothermic (cold-blooded) water-dwelling... The Murray River in Australia. ... Trinomial name Ursus arctos horribilis (Ord, 1815) The Grizzly Bear, sometimes called the Silvertip Bear, has traditionally been treated as a subspecies Ursus arctos horribilis of the Brown Bear, living in North America. ... This article is about the meanings of the word form connected with shape or structure. ... Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Rhetoric (from Greek ρήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are dialectic and grammar) in Western culture. ... Semiotics, or semiology, is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ...

Hymes clearly considers folklore and narrative a vital part of the fields of linguistics, anthropology and literature, and has bemoaned the fact that so few scholars in those fields are willing and able to adequately include folklore in its original language in their considerations (Hymes 1981:6-7). He feels that the translated versions of the stories are inadequate for understanding their role in the social or mental system in which they existed. He provides an example that in Navajo, the particles (utterances such as "uh," "So," "Well," etc. that have linguistic if not semantic meaning), omitted in the English translation, are essential to understanding how the story is shaped and how repetition defines the structure — in the Lévi-Straussian sense — that the text embodies. Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. ... ... The term Navajo (occasionally spelled Navaho) or Diné refers to the Navajo Nation and its people, and to the Navajo language. ... In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. ... In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...

External links

• Dell Hymes' personal web site

Major Works

• Language in Culture and Society (1964)
• editor, Reinventing Anthropology (1972)
• Foundations in sociolinguistics (1974)
• Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays (1980)
• "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (1981)
• Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology (1983)
• Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice (1996)
• Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (2003)

Bibliography

• Gaalswyk, Greg (2001) Dell Hymes. dell.html