A Conceptual Recreation of Perkins 1992 : Is there a connection between deictic and societal complexity?
Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Does the complexity of the societies we live in affect the way we speak? Or to the way we refer to people, items and actions? This study aims to do a conceptual recreation of Perkins 1992 study about deictic and societal complexity to answer an aspect of that question. Is there a connection between deictic and societal complexity? Perkins 1992 study “Deixis, grammar and culture” argues that high societal complexity corelates with low deictic complexity. In contrast Perkins 1992 shows the opposite pattern for tense marking. Perkins 1992 used data from Murdock et.al. 1999 “The Ethnographic Atlas”, a database of ethnographic data used to calculate societal complexity (see theory), to measure societal complexity and data sourced from grammars to calculate his deictic complexity. Perkins 1992 also looked at gender/noun classes as a part of his deictic complexity even though this is not a deictic. In this study I show that deictic complexity as defined by Perkins 1992 does not significantly correlate with societal complexity when using a different method of phylogenetic correction, the sister pair method. The relationship between the two kinds of complexity seem to be independent of each other.
Author: Wijk, Johan
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7018085410