Chapter 12
Because of the widespread use of mass media today, sociolinguists have found increasing homogeneity in the use of language in the United States, true or false?
False
True or False: Languages change very slowly, taking generations or even centuries to shift.
False
True or False: According to Edward Sapir, language is the symbolic guide to culture.
True
True or False: Although language is one of the most rule-bound aspects of human culture, it is also one of the least conscious.
True
True or False: America's pattern of gender inequality is built into our linguistic practices.
True
True or False: Elaborating symbols and summarizing symbols work in opposite ways.
True
True or False: Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it makes a mistake.
True
What is a feature of language?
all of the above (it is used to communicate, it is systematic, it consists of sounds organized into words according to some sort of grammar)
According to ethnopoetics, what is true of every speech act?
all speech acts are performances
What is a contributing factor to the development of creoles, pidgins, and other hybrid forms of language?
colonialism, globalism, and commerce
The study of how sociocultural norms and contexts shape language use in society is called
sociolinguistics
Which scholar believes that language is the symbolic guide to culture?
Edward Sapir
Talking about sports as a battlefield is an example of
a metaphor
Linguists refer to mixed languages with a simplified grammar that people rarely learn as a mother tongue as
a pidgin language
A stoplight is a visual example of which of the following?
a sign
Words that came from the same ancestral language and originated from the same word are called
cognate words
If you were interested not only in how people are supposed to speak, but how people actually speak, what anthropological approach would you be most likely to adopt?
ethnography of speaking
When people assume that if you speak with a southern accent you are not well educated, they are acting on
language ideology
What is the study of grammatical categories, such as tense and word order, called?
morphology
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner distinguished three kinds of culturally powerful symbols that include all of the following except
narrative symbols
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?
parole
When language speakers use slang or metaphor, they are engaging in which concept suggested by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure?
parole
What term refers to the structure of speech sounds?
phonology
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 people, and senior citizens pronounce ordinary American words
For pastoral groups such as the Dinka and the Nuer, the cow acts as which kind of symbol?
summarizing symbol
The use of wild animals or birds of prey to represent sports teams is
symbolic
Edward Sapir urged cultural anthropologists to pay close attention to language during field research because
the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built from the language habits of a particular social group, language is a guide to "social reality", and we understand the material world through the language we speak
Philology is
the approach that compares ancient texts and documents to analyze long-term linguistic change
Linguistic relativity is
the idea that people speaking different languages perceive the world differently
In her work on gender and language in the workplace, what did Robin Lakoff pay close attention to when analyzing speech?
tone, volume, and intonation