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Edward Sapir  

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  • Edward Sapir (1884–1939), the undisputed doyen of the linguists among the classic first generation of Franz Boas's students in American anthropology, carried out fieldwork on more than 30 different American Indian languages, dramatically simplified the classification of Native American language families, produced process-based grammars that remain models of linguistic description, and defined a phonemic level of analysis relying on native speaker intuition rather than on form alone. He turned in midcareer to what later came to be called culture and personality, emphasizing individual creativity within the patterns set out by language and culture, and was anthropology's primary representative in the Rockefeller Foundation–funded interdisciplinary social science of the interwar years. [Source: Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia; Sapir, Edward]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/Edward_Sapir

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