John J. Gumperz

John Joseph Gumperz (1922 - ) is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.

Works

John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new method called the "ethnography of communication." Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguistics analyzes variation in discourse, within a particular speech community, and studies how that variation affects the unfolding of meaning in interaction and correlates with the social order of the community.

Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the speaker affect the way in which they make conversational inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs known as contextualisation cues.

His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India. [Citation
last = Annamalai
first = E.
editor-last = Paulston
editor-first = Christina Bratt
editor2-last = Tucker
editor2-first = G. Richard
contribution = Development of Sociolinguistics in India
title = The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections
year = 1997
pages = 35-41
publisher = Summer Institute of Linguistics
isbn = 1-55671-022-4]

References

External links

* [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/gumperz/gumppub.html A list of Gumperz's publications]