29 - Linguistic anthropology in the age of language automata

Summary

This chapter shows the ways some of the core claims and methods of linguistic anthropologists. It describes key concepts of computer science in their own terms, developing the relation between different kinds of languages and different kinds of computers. A computer may be abstractly understood as a sieving device that accepts certain strings of characters and rejects others. The chapter develops these ideas at length, as grounded in standard works on this subject, and also describes the core operations that computers must be able to perform if they are to sieve strings in these ways. Linguistic anthropology came of age in the time of language automata, but somehow managed to studiously avoid what it is arguably destined to embrace. Automata are exemplary instances of relatively black-boxed, rule-bound, and deterministic intermediaries. In particular, three key classes of sieving devices are deterministic finite automata (DFA), context-free grammars (CFG), and turing machines (TM).