Anthropology Chapter 4: Linguistics

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

A: Narrative symbols

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

A: Pidgin language

Koko and Washo were two primates who had learned...

B: American Sign Language

In the Melanesian conception of time, the future is spatially located...

B: Behind the body

The human ability to speak about the past, about items not present and about imaginary worlds is called...

B: Displacement

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

B: False

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

B: Langue

The study of meaningful units formed by a combination of phonemes is called...

B: Morphology

Animal call systems lack the ability (found in human languages) to produce an infinite number of word combinations. This ability in human language is called...

B: Productivity

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

C: Can speak using larynx

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

C: Cognitive words

The study of how people classify things in the world is called...

C: Ethnoscience

The US government's prohibition of Native American children speaking their indigenous languages in Indian schools has contributed most profoundly to...

C: Language death

____ refers to an individual bit of sound that changes meaning.

C: Phoneme

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

C: Red

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

D: A summarizing symbol

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

D: Phonology