Ch.15 Flashcards
Briefly describe non-verbal communication.
The process of sending and receiving messages without the use of words, (e.g. through gestures, facial expressions, or nonverbal vocalizations). This is also referred to as paralanguage.
Is non-verbal communication, such as body language, understood the same in all cultures?
No, they are not. Many of the nonverbal signals we use are culturally specific, learned through living within a specific community; such as, accurate interpretation of the signals, requires the receiver of the message to be aware of the nonverbal communication customs of the senders culture
Briefly describe how the use of space is another way to send non-verbal messages.
Proxemics: the study of how different societies perceive and use space.
The amount of space we leave between ourselves, and others depends on both our cultural learned understanding of the space around us and our relationship with the other person.
There are four different kinds of interpersonal space that could be compared cross culturally: intimate, personal, social, and public.
The first two categories relate to the space we feel comfortable sharing with people with whom we have a close a relationship, (e.g. when talking to family or friends); the other two relate to space we feel comfortable sharing with strangers (e.g., standing in a line at the grocery store, or sitting in a waiting room).
Compare and contrast linguistic competence and communicative competence.
Linguistic competence: a term coined by linguistic Noam Chomsky to refer to the mastery of adult grammar.
Communicative competence: the term coined by anthropologist linguistic Dell Hymes to refer to the mastery of adult rules for socially and culturally appropriate speech
Briefly describe the focus of sociolinguistics.
The study of language in relation to social factors, such as differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, power, and gender differences, and bilingualism.
Also, study socially appropriate rules.
A key question for anthropologists has been, how does language affect the way we see the world? Briefly describe the linguistic relativity principle.
A position, associated with Edward sapir, and Benjamin Whorf, that asserts that language has the power to shape with the way people see in the world.
They observed that grammar of different languages often describes the same situation in different ways.
What is the strong version of this principle referred to as?
Linguistic determinism: is a totalizing view of language that reduces patterns of thought and culture to the grammatical patterns of the spoken language.
Ex: if a grammar classifies nouns in male and female gender categories, linguistic, determinists claim that speakers of that language of forced think of males and females as radically different kinds of beings.
By contrast a language that makes no grammatical distinctions on the basis of gender, supposedly trains, and speakers to think of males and females, as exactly the same
Identify the four problems with linguistic determinism.
- There are language is such Fulfulde in which only 1/3 person pronoun is used for males and females; however, male dominant social patterns are quite evident among Fulfulde speakers.
- If language determines thought in this way, it would be impossible to translate from one language to another, or even to learn another language with a different grammatical structure. Because human beings can learn foreign languages and translate from one language to another, the strong version of the linguistic relativity principal cannot be correct.
- Even if it were possible to draw firm boundaries around speech communities, every language provides, it’s a native speakers with alternative ways of describing the world.
- In many societies, people learn to speak more than one language fluently yet people who grow up bilingual, do not also grow up, unable to reconcile to contradictory views of reality. Indeed, bilingual children, ordinarily benefit from knowing two languages do not confuse them can switch readily from one to another, and even appear to demonstrate greater cognitive flexibility on psychological tests, then monolingual’s.
Briefly describe ethnopragmatics.
The study of language use that relies on ethnography to illuminate the ways in which speech is both constituted by and constitutive of social interaction.
What is meant by heteroglossia?
Is a set of coexisting, linguistic, norms, and forms, each representing a different social sub group.
How may heteroglossia challenge linguistic determinism?
Because we all participate in more than one of the sub groups and become fluent in many varieties of language, even if we only speak English our capacity for heteroglossia is an example of linguistic openness: it means that our thoughts and speech are not imprisoned in a single set of grammatical forms as linguistic determinists argued.
What is a pidgin language?
In local communities speakers and listeners are for the most part, able to use overlapping language habits to converse or argue about moral and political issues.
This may also be the case, when communities of speakers engage regularly with one another, but do not speak the same languages, or speak them equally fluently.
Sometimes, however, communities find themselves sharing a little more than physical proximity to one another, and have radically different language, traditions, and no history of previous contact with one another. When these two different groups, come face-to-face, and are forced to communicate a new form of language—pidgin— may develop.
In what contexts do these languages usually arise?
- A language, with no native speakers that develops in a single generation between members of communities that possess distinct native languages.
- A shared secondary language in a speech community, in which speakers also use some other main language.
What is linguistic inequality?
Making value judgements about other people’s speech in the context of dominance and subordination. 
Briefly describe the residential school system as a powerful example of linguistic inequality.
Indigenous children were taken away from their families, forced to attend residential schools, and prohibited from speaking indigenous languages; and if they did, they were punished for doing so.
