ANTHROPOLOGY chapter 12

What term refers to the structure of speech sounds?

Phonology

America's pattern of gender inequality is built into our linguistic practices.

True

Elaborating symbols and summarizing symbols work in opposite ways.

True

The set of sounds and movements that animals make to communicate is called a __________.

Animal call system

When anthropologists study the way people use language in real settings rather than as a set of grammatical rules, what are they are focusing on?

Langue

Words that differ by only one single sound contrast, like in the case of "ban," "man," and "pan," are called __________ pairs

Minimal

__________ is the study of how sociocultural norms and contexts shape language use in society

Sociolinguistics

Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it makes a mistakeTrue

True

Although all primates use some form of call system, some, such as __________ and __________, are known to be capable of more complex communication than a simple call system

Chimps; Gorilla

Words that came from the same ancestral language and originated from the same word are called

Cognate words

For pastoral groups such as the Dinka and the Nuer, the cow acts as which kind of symbol?

Elaborating symbol

What is the study of how people classify things in the world called?

Ethnoscience

Because of the widespread use of mass media today, sociolinguists have found increasing homogeneity in the use of language in the United States.

False

Countries find it relatively easy to decide what language its citizens will speak.

False

If Jakob Grimm, who developed what has come to be known as Grimm's law, were analyzing the historical relationships among the so-called dialects of Chinese (such as Cantonese and Mandarin), what data would he be looking for in his linguistic fieldwork?

How the speakers of each dialect pronounce different words with similar meanings in several dialects

Ferdinand de Saussure made a distinction between the formal rules of language (__________) and the ways people speak it (__________).

Langue; Parole

Anthropologist Sherry Ortner distinguished three kinds of culturally powerful symbols that include all of the following except

Narrative

A stoplight is a visual example of which of the following?

Sign

Koko and Washo were two primates who had learned

Sign language

If Benjamin Whorf were trying to find further proof that grammar shapes the way people perceive the world, which of the following would not be a focus of his research?

The density of the population in the several communities

__________ is the idea that people speaking different languages perceive the world differently.a. Linguistic relativity

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

If you were conducting a symbolic analysis of TV programs and wanted to identify a key scenario such as the Horatio Alger myth, which of the following would you focus on?

Plots that are repeated in many of the programs that American viewers interpret as commonplace social experiences

If you were a linguistic anthropologist interested in language change in smaller American cities, building on William Labov's studies from the 1980s, what method would you use?

Record how younger people, middle aged, and senior citizens pronounces ordinary american words

The Canadian government helps preserve the use of French by requiring all official documents to be written in both English and French. The provincial government of the Canadian province of Quebec has implemented further regulations that require that signs have French letters larger than English letters. Why is the size of letters important?

The regulations themselves give French Canadians a feeling that they are as important as English speakers, even though they are in the minority symbolically, the size of the letters suggests the importance of the language; all of these

According to anthropologist Sherry Ortner's analysis, the American flag is an example of

A summarizing symbol

Edward Sapir urged cultural anthropologists to pay close attention to language during field research because

All of the above

Which of the following features are characteristic of language?

All of the above

Which of the following is a feature of language?

All of the above

When language speakers use slang or metaphor, they are engaging in which concept suggested by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure?

Parole

The approach that compares ancient texts and documents to analyze long-term linguistic change is called __________

Philology

__________ are words or objects that stand for something else

Symbol

In evolutionary terms, humans are distinct from other primates with respect to their ability to use language because

We can speak using our larynx

Which of the following is a contributing factor to the development of creoles, pidgins, and other hybrid forms of language?

all of the above

What anthropological approach to language distinguishes the ways people actually speak from the ideal ways that people are supposed to speak?

ethnography of speaking

The key scenario differs from other kinds of symbols because it

implies how people should act

On the island of Java in Indonesia, nearly every sentence marks a person's __________ between speaker and listener

position/social position

Most mammals use some form of call system to communicate with others of their species. Dogs and chimpanzees share an additional linguistic characteristic because they can communicate simple combinations of ideas about things they are not currently seeing.

False

Talking about sports as a battlefield is an example of

Metaphor

According to Edward Sapir, language is the symbolic guide to culture.

True

What would an ethnography of speaking entail?

Consists of hearing and representing distinctive ways of speaking WITHIN particular speech communities

A language of mixed origin that developed from a complex blending of two parent languages is called

Creole

Languages change very slowly, taking generations or even centuries to shift

False

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that if a language had only three color terms, they would always be black (dark), white (light), and __________

Red

If you studied speech patterns such as those analyzed in Robin Lakoff's study of gendered speech, you might find that "talking like a lady"

Marginalizes women's voices in work contexts

What is the study of grammatical categories, such as tense and word order, called?

Morphology

Animal call systems

Patterned sounds of utterance that express meaning, limited compared to human call system

Although language is one of the most rule-bound aspects of human culture, it is also one of the least conscious.

True

Linguists refer to mixed languages with a simplified grammar that people rarely learn as a mother tongue as

a pidgin language