Ch. 4: Language
Linguists refer to mixed languages with a simplified grammar that people rarely learn as a mother tongue as
a pidgin language
Animal call systems
are highly irregular among primates
The individual sounds used in languages to symbolically produce meaning are called
phonemes
Koko and Washo were two primates who had learned
American Sign Language
The study of how people classify things in the world is called
ethnoscience
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
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 _______________________.
Productivity
According to anthropologist Sherry Ortner's analysis, the American flag is an example of
a summarizing symbol
Words that came from the same ancestral language and originated from the same word are called
cognate words
A stoplight is a visual example of which of the following?
sign
In the Melanesian conception of time, the future is spatially located
Behind the body
Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it makes a mistake. (True or False)
True
Talking about sports as a battlefield is an example of
a metaphor
Which of the following is a feature of language?
it consists of sounds organized into words according to some sort of grammar
The study of how sounds combine together to make meaningful units is 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, they are focusing on
parole
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
