Important Concepts from Unit 4 Notes Flashcards
as Dell Hymes argued, the socially effective use of language also requires what he termed “____________”
communicative competence, the mastery of rules for socially/culturally appropriate speech given a specific context
why should cultural anthropologists care about language?
they must frequently learn new languages for fieldwork, language contains grammatical and conceptual ideas that serve as inspiration for research, and can provide important insight to culture/traditions
language is a ______ phenomenon
biocultural
why is language a biocultural phenomenon?
language and speech requires basic human anatomy to function, we must use our mouth, tongue, teeth, vocal cords, throat etc. to make sound…. it’s biologically possible for all humans but also is inherently cultural!
all _____ are equal in their ability to communicate experience
languages, this is an important conclusion maintained by many linguistic/cultural anthropologists
cultural/linguistic anthropologists take a firm stance against _______, which is the idea that some languages are superior to others
linguistic ethnocentrism
what are the six design features of language, created by Charles Hockett?
- Openness (we have open call systems, something can have many meanings)
- Displacement (good memory, being able to talk about things from the past/non-existent objects)
- Prevarication (“to lie” and form grammatically correct but nonsensical sentences)
- Arbitrariness (not every word needs to have meaning, a tree can just be called a tree)
- Duality of Patterning (sound/meaning, phonemes/morphemes)
- Semanticity (language means things!)
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are all components of _______
language
what is phonology?
the study of the sounds of language
what is morphology?
the study of the minimal units of meaning (morphemes) in a language
what is syntax?
the study of sentence structure
what is the definition of semantics?
the study of meaning… what a word in a sentence means, what a sentence as a whole means, what someone else may mean when they speak the sentence, etc.
In the 1960s, the famous linguist Noam Chomsky sparked interest in the formal study of ___________ when he argued that grammars represented all of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge as sets of abstract rules.
semantics
formal semantics defined words in terms of ________, or “the formal meaning(s) of a word, as given in a dictionary”
denotation
what does connotation mean?
additional meanings of a word that derive from the typical contexts in which they are used and rely on personal and cultural associations
what is a metaphor?
a form of thought and language that asserts a meaningful link between two expressions from different semantic domains
what is the definition of pragmatics?
the study of language in the context of its use
Michael Silverstein is widely recognized as one of the first scholars to…
identify and insist on the idea of pragmatics
The ____________ can be understood as a theory that language, and, more specifically, linguistic forms such as grammar and vocabulary, shape the way in which a specific language’s users see the world.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
how did the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis come to be? what’s the story behind it?
there was no word between “empty” and “full” regarding oil canisters that still had oil fumes in them, but no oil left
linguistic determinism is the “strong” version of what hypothesis?
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
linguistic determination:
theres a link between the words we use to the culture we experience, if our language assigns gender as a grammatical rule; we are forced to think of females and males as vastly different beings (some languages are gender-neutral!)
what are the objections to linguistic determination? that have led to a “weak version” of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- gender inequality still exists within societies using gender-neutral language)
- we can translate between different languages
- there is always diversity within any given cultural group
- the existence of bilingual children (these kids don’t struggle to define the world in different languages, in fact it makes them more equipped intellectually and societally!)
“Some researchers argue that while the grammar and vocabulary of a language don’t determine thought and behaviour it may influence them. In this view, the existence of a binary gender pronoun system wouldn’t entirely determine values and ideas about gender, but it might contribute to making such a binary system seem natural”- what theory is this sentence explaining?
the “weak” version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
______: the study of language use in a specific culture, grounded in an ethnographic approach, with close attention to the relationships among language, communication, and social interaction
ethnopragmatics
____________ takes into account both the formal dimensions of language (phonemes, morphemes, syntax) and the influence of context on how language produces meaning and shapes social interactions
ethnopragmatics
_____: the historically specific conventions and ideals according to which authors compose discourse and audiences receive it
genres, a genre can be a classification like science fiction, or the difference between different communicative patterns and expectations in different scenarios (ex: talking to your boss, talking to your siblings/friends)
_______ refers to the co-existence of different genres and styles of speech.
Heteroglossia
_________: in which one language is taken as the standard against which all others are measured and often deemed inadequate
linguistic ethnocentrism, ex: residential schools i Canada when kids couldn’t speak their native languages because English is more “proper”
When speakers pass a ____ language on to a next generation, linguists usually refer to the language of the new generations as _____
- pidgin
- creole
