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