A Grammar of the Archaeological Record (Version 2, Beta release)

References. Topics

Grammar

Giorgio Buccellati – August 2026

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Linguistic and other grammars

I will first mention a few key references pertaining to teh notion of grammar as used in the linguistic domain, and then some other uses of the term and concept in archaeology and other fields.

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The structuralist turn

This view of grammar is rooted in a series of profound transformations in linguistic thought, from Port-Royal in the 1600 to De Saussure, Chomsky and beyond, for instance into pragmatics and interactional linguistics.

see CGPT

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Epistemics

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Hermeneutics

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Archaeological grammars

Clarke 1978 devotes section III of chapter 11 to the notion of what an archaeological grammar is. He diefines it as

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Other grammars

Shape grammar

Newman

Meshel

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References

The grammatical approach proposed here differs substantially from the way in which one normally looks at archaeology from an epistemological point of view. See for example Bednarik 2003 [add titles]

B 1996 OB grammar

Port-Royal, De Saussure, Chomsky

“grammar” in other fields Meshel 2014

Stiny, George,1 and James Gips. 1972. “Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture.” In Information Processing 71: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 71, edited by C. V. Freiman, 1460–1465. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge.

Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Translated by Laurence Scott; revised and edited by Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press. Originally published in Russian in 1928.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1969. Grammaire du Décaméron. The Hague: Mouton.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. French original, Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 1958.

Three chapters deserve particular attention: “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology” “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws” “The Structural Study of Myth” The first is particularly pertinent because Lévi-Strauss asks explicitly what anthropology can appropriate from structural linguistics. The volume presents his structural method across kinship, social organization, religion, mythology, and art.

interactional linguistics (Minna) ~ presentation and hermeneutics – see maieutics

see pragmatics and maieutics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_archaeology

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Notes

1^  note about contacts with Stiny at UCLA

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