6: Communications Flashcards
Haptic communication
Communication via touch
Paralanguage etymology
“Beside” language
What is paralanguage
Nonverbal form of communication, accompanying words. The meaning and emotional state of speaker, accompanying their words.
Speech community
People who share a sense of norms about how to communicate
High-context culture
Culture where communication is largely dependent on nonverbal cues and social context. Verbal communication tends to be ambiguous, implicit, and in exact.
Language is learned. Meanings behind words and sounds are _______. Meaning is provided by _______ and ______.
Arbitrary. Tradition and consensus.
Diglossia
2 languages used by 1 speech community
To examine communication, we must know…
- Knowledge about speakers: age, gender, class, etc.
- Cultural rules about appropriateness and social situations
- Explicit and implicit norms surrounding communication.
Guarani vs. Spanish
Spanish seen as more formal, the language of prestige. Guarani used in informal situations and talking to people of lower class. Guarani seen as more emotional and actually provokes feeling of national pride
Back-and-forth negotiation in conversation is more characteristic of ____-context culture. A conversation in which the speaker must be explicit and the listener interprets is characteristic of a _____-context culture.
Low, high
Code-switching and diglossia: bilingual choices depend on
- Location of interaction
- Degree of intimacy
- Degree of formality
- Seriousness of discourse
Lingua Franca
Common language that people use, when they don’t share the same native/first language
Indexical
A speech feature that signals an aspect or aspects of social identity
Examples of indexicals
Pronouns, kinship terms, forms of address
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Hypothesis that language influences our thoughts and thus our behaviour. Influences how we at ego rise certain concepts, eg. Time and space, directionality
Examples of Sapir-Whorf
- Navajo vs English: categorizing by form vs colour
- gendered languages: some languages emphasize gender more (Finnish vs Hebrew)
- people assigning gendered traits to nouns whose genderedness is actually arbitrary (keys and bridges in German and Spanish)
- Kuuk Thaayorre: cardinal directions instead of left/right/up/down
Slides discussed Sapir-Whorf and politeness pronouns. What example was used?
Thailand: pronouns reference a king
First-person pronoun meant “I, the slave of Buddha”
Second-person pronoun addressed the dirt-beneath your shoes, signalling humbleness to the person in reference
Language and gender: who talks more?
Men
Language and gender: describe interruption trends
M-M: some interruptions
F-F: some interruptions, more than M-M
M-F: predominantly interrupting women!
F-M: very rarely interrupting men
Language and gender: In conversation, who takes more & longer turns
Men
How do women play a supportive role in conversation?
“Back-channels”
Asking questions
Attentional beginnings
Longer silences
Language and gender: who has an easier time bringing up topics, and what are the #s
Men: succeed 97% of the time
Women: succeed 37% of the time
What are genderlects
- different expressions of speech that different gender use. Men use stronger language, women more gentle. Women use less vulgarities
Language and nationalism
Quebec and french: French seen as the language of government, fo the workplace, of education, law, and business
Quebecer identity strongly tied to language