Spring 2018 Anth/Eng 281:Midterm Review Guide : a quasi-essay approach to passing a test--Do the results form a gestalt of understanding? Is the whole greater than the parts" In the end, does the examinee have a full, clear Gricean grasp of the material presented in the course?
Week One: Introduction definitions, long answer
Q. Why is language “never neutral”; why can we call language “a social action?”
A. "neutral"--not helping or supporting either side in a conflict. See: Service Canada gender-neutral language replacing "mother" "father" with "parent" and eliminating Mr. and Mrs. (and possibly Mssr. and Madame)
Q. What do we mean by communicative competence?
A. language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately.
Q. What does it mean to say that language is multifunctional? What are its 6 functions?
A. (Jakobson) Referential ("The earth is flat and has been warped into a geosphere by gravitation."), Poetic ("I think, therefore I am"), Emotive ("Hell No, We Won't Go..!!"), Conative, Phatic ("Cheers"), Metalingual ("To be, or not to be.")
Referential--It is a mistaken belief that the earth is round.
Poetic--There's no success in failure,
Emotive--Hell no, we won't go..!!
Conative-- Be true to your school.
Phatic-- Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.
Metalingual--To be or not to be, that is the question.
creppm--conative referential emotive phatic poetic metalingual
conative --be true to your school
referential--the earth is flat
emotive--hell no we wont go
phatic--goodnight mrs calabash
poetic there's no success in failure
metalingual to be or not to be
Q.What is a language ideology? What are language ideologies “about”?
A. A classic example is the 1997 controversy over Ebonics and the Oakland School Board. On one side of the spectrum were those who argued that recognition of "Merican" or Black English would help the ghetto kids learn "proper" King's English faster, possibly by code-switching and mixing.
Q. What is indexicality in regard to language?
A. It is relative to the observer: a first responder might see smoke and conclude fire. To a US Marine, "smoke" might indicate, by its color, the status of an LZ where the helicopter was about to land. If the Marine interpreted smoke meant fire instead of whether an LZ was secure or not, he might set the helicopter down into an ambush.There is no universal codified system that establishes what smoke means, in other words, indexicality is contextual.
Week Two: Multimodality; Origin and Evolution of Language
definitions, Short answer; long answer re: NSL
Q. What is multimodality? Be able to define and provide an example of this, examples of paralinguistic features
A. writing, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial patterns: body language, a disillusioned stare into space, tone of voice,
Q. What is a continuity vs. discontinuity theory in regard to the origin of language?
A. Continuity describes the process of language development throughout mankind's existence, from early cave painting interpretations, assignment of words to objects, development of syntax, conjugation and grammar.
Discontinuity is a rather bold interpretation of the development of language based on a significant mutation, possibly genetic, that caused the sudden appearance of speaking man. It is not so far fetched in context of the Biblical story of the tower of Babel where just the opposite occurred, which may or may not have also been related to a genetic aberration.
Q. What are social information theories of language (there are 3!)?
A.
Q. What did the Oldowan tool experiments reveal about potential connections between the co-evolution of language and technology?
A. In these experiments, and there was more than one, various groups were given assignments to create stone tools by knapping. Each group was handicapped by various means, such as straight observation, the use of gesturing, and the inclusion of spoken language. Any conclusion can be drawn form these types of experiments and each may be incorrect. The participants had prior knowledge of processes involved; not necessarily technological, but knowledge of language and gestures, making results contingent on the ethnographic backgrounds of the participants. Only the Stone Age creators of the tools knew the process and it cannot be recreated in a modern environment. This is almost consistent with an analogy to Chomsky's "sudden appearance of language" theory.
Q. How is the hyoid bone important evidence for language origins? How about FOXPZ?
A. The hyoid is a speech intensive bone unattached to any other but moved in conjunction with local muscular activity. It is uncertain if the Neanderthals had such an apparatus, but it might be referred to contextually as a "wishbone". Curiously, aside from it's direct connection to language, it may also be a referential system for position and navigation. The gene FOXPZ plays a part in the evolution of speech and language but it is an extremely complicated field of genetics that bases results on large epochs of human evolution.
Q. What are pidgin languages? Creoles? Why might these types of languages help us understand how language arose in humans?
A. Pidgin: grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common: typically. Creole: a stable natural language developed from a mixture of different languages at a fairly sudden point in time: One might suggest that ebonics is a form of creole although the debate is often times intense as to whether it is a bonafide language, possibly more of a non-standard dialect. Its value to the evolution of language depends on how it developed, both regionally and spatially.
Q. Why is the appearance and development of Nicaraguan Sign Language so important to our understanding of human language?
Normally, a population is gifted with the sense of hearing, this is not the case for the deaf children in the western Managua region who were initially outcasts from an already overburdened primary educational system under the newly formed communist government. Teachers first made attempts to communicate using gestures such as drawing out letters of the alphabet but were unsuccessful in communicating. Pidgin and creole type systems proved inadequate and eventually the kids formed their own gestures, which were passed on to newer generations. Linguists have been at odds since its development as to whether it is a bonafide language, whether it can even be understood and could it be deciphered into codified, iconic symbols.
http://www.language-archives.org/item/oai:sil.org:47207
The estimated deaf population in Nicaragua, at 600,000, far exceeds the estimates in surrounding countries. There is only one deaf association in the country: Asociación Nacional de Sordos de Nicaragua (ANSNIC). ANSNIC is focused on providing a place for deaf people to meet, support each other, and develop the community. In addition to ANSNIC, deaf people meet at religious services and with at least six known deaf ministries meeting in the capital city of Managua. Since its emergence in the late 1970s with increased deaf interaction in deaf schools, the government has recognized Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) as the first language of the deaf community, approved the use of ISN in deaf classrooms in 1993, and helped publish the first ISN dictionary in 1997. In 1997, ANSNIC estimated that there were 3,000 ISN users in Nicaragua with most others having little access to a developed sign language. ISN continues to gain prestige and acceptance in the general Nicaraguan community and the number of ISN users grows as ANSNIC pursues unification of the deaf people throughout Nicaragua.
Week 3: Speech Acts and Conversation definitions, Short answer
Q. What are speech acts and events, according to Austin? (6 kinds !)
"I promise to order and greet a warning to invite and congratulate"
promising,
ordering,
greeting,
warning,
inviting and
congratulating
A. action-representative-commusive, directive, declarative, expusive, verdactive, performative locution, illocution, perlocution
He introduces the concept of illocutionary acts, and carefully distinguishes them from locutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. Locutionary acts include phonetic acts, phatic acts, and rhetic acts. Phonetic acts are acts of pronouncing sounds, phatic acts are acts of uttering words or sentences in accordance with the phonological and syntactic rules of the language to which they belong, and rhetic acts are acts of uttering a sentence with sense and more or less definite reference. One can exercise judgment (Verdictive), exert influence or exercise power (Exercitive), assume obligation or declare intention (Commissive), adopt attitude, or express feeling (Behabitive), and clarify reasons, argument, or communication (Expositive).
“I now pronounce you man and wife.” The sentence, according to Austin and Searle, has three functions: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The locutionary function is saying the actual words, the illocutionary does something (it legally recognizes the couple's relationship), and the perlocutionary expresses the psychological consequences of what is said (in this case, a higher level of commitment and intimacy).
"A locutionary act has to do with the simple act of a speaker saying something, i.e. the act of producing a meaningful linguistic expression. It consists of three sub-acts. they are (i) a phonic act of producing an utterance-inscription, (ii) a phatic act of composing a particular linguistic expression in a particular language, and (iii) a rhetic act (deixis) of contextualizing the utterance-inscription.
deixis--https://www.thoughtco.com/deictic-expression-deixis-1690428
"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."
(Prison warden addressing Luke in Cool Hand Luke, 1967)
First of all, "The Captain" was addressing the entire group, the "we" didn't just mean The Captain and Luke, or at least it could be taken in two different ways. Not only that, the author of this article didn't even transcribe it correctly:
What we've got here is...failure to communicate."
There is no "a" in it.
https://www.thoughtco.com/speech-act-theory-1691986
Representatives "fourscore and 7 years ago"
Commissives, I’ll pick you up at 8
Directives I dare you
Expressives sorry to hear about
Declarations --"you're fired"
Verdictives— guilty..
Q. What is Grice’s cooperative principle and the 4 maxims? What are its 4 parts?
A. quantity: where one is informative as possible;
quality: truthful;
relation: relevant;
manner: clear, brief, orderly.
Q. Why might we violate the cooperative principle?
A. In a breakdown of communication as in avoidance to be truthful; such as not being truthful in order to avoid lying. One might argue if asked, "Do you like the Anthropology class?" and answer, "It is very challenging."
Q. What are adjacency pairs? What can they tell us about conversation?
A. This is a reciprocity agreement between two people when engaged in discourse. It is based upon an assumption that both will respond accordingly as the dialogue develops. There are a given number of maxims here that insure the discourse will reach an end desirable to both, or more, involved. That is not always the case; a breakdown of communication might result, the Grice four components may not be strictly observed and there may be subconscious, hidden motives to direct the outcome. An adjacency pair only guarantees that the conversation will continue, not the outcome expected.
Q. What is conversational repair, and why is significant who performs the repair? (What does that reveal about norms and social structure?)
A. Normally, for a dialogue to continue and be to some degree successful, necessary nuances need be introduced to keep the reasoning on track. That does not mean they are going to be welcome and, for that matter, even accepted. Nobody likes to be corrected unless the mistake is so blatantly obvious that the person who made it goes beyond initial embarrassment to accept fault out of ignorance or simple unconscious error. The one making the correction, if it isn't the person who made the error, will be careful to use a great deal of tact and, of course, etiquette, when making the correction.
Week 4: Language Acquisition and Socialization long answer
Be familiar with major aspects of the language acquisition process; e.g. general stages
Q. Why might certain grammatical features occur in different orders in speakers of different first languages?
A. A syntax requirement is many times necessary to make a sentence grammatically correct, especially when it comes to which particular verb to use. Components such as gender and number are essential for correct structure. In many cases, in some languages articles are omitted while they are necessary in others. Another component in a language is the use of idiomatic expressions that have no direct translation into another. A speaker may thus have to alter his presentation in order to clarify meaning with respect to the above parameters.
Q. What are some major ways in which Kaluli and other non-English language socialization processes differ from those of Standard American English?
A.
Q. What is self-lowering/child-raising in regard to language socialization?
A. Ahearn, Chapter 3.
Q. Why is the idea of the “language gap” problematic?
A. Fifty years of research has revealed the sad truth that the children of lower-income, less-educated parents typically enter school with poorer language skills than their more privileged counterparts. By some measures, 5-year-old children of lower socioeconomic status score more than two years behind on standardized language development tests by the time they enter school. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/september/toddler-language-gap-091213.html
Week 5: Multilingualism defiitions, Short answer
Q. Approximately how much of the world’s population is multilingual?
A. Depending on where the researcher draws data, the consensus shows about 50 percent.
Q. What are the three most commonly spoken languages in the US?
A. English, Spanish, Chinese.
Q. What is the third most commonly spoken language in Nevada?
A. Possibly Tagalog, possibly Chinese, depending on which web based stat page. Just about every one of them are in disagreement and reflects the breakdown of a Grice interpretation where quality and quantity collide.
Q. What is code-mixing vs. code-switching?
A. "Code-mixing" -- Interchanging the two languages throughout the utterance, unconscious behavior as when someone is upset.
"Code-switching"--an individuals use of two or more language varieties in the same speech event or exchange, speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation, conscious behavior, possibly more to rationalize to the speaker what he/she is saying.
Q. What are some of the reasons bilinguals might
engage in these practices (e.g. what are the social meanings of mixing/switching?)
A. It is all too easy to attach a "social meaning" to a straightforward process to be understood, especially in the workplace. A worker who is language impaired has to trust his co-worker to describe in the most advantageous and adequate manner the solution to a problem, such as how to repair a switch on an electric oven, without getting electrocuted by a 220 volt charge when he plugs the oven back into the wall.
Q. Where do some of the negative views of bilingualism stem from, and what are they?
A. First of all, the negative views are in the mind of the beholder and represent the tendency to judge someone's opinion based on one's own ethnographic background. There is absolutely no quantitative basis of fact to show that certain groups, whether so-called "racial" or economic divisions, create a stereotype of attitudes toward a bilingual person; or someone who doesn't even speak the given predominant language of the population. It is ignorance in reverse and unacceptable to assume there is a negative view of those who are bilingual.
Q. What are some positive effects/consequences of bilingualism — both social ones and cognitive ones?
A. From a strictly cranial point of view, the brain processes information in mysterious ways. The social benefit consequence pales in comparison to how it affects cognition. There are some who might propose that two languages in the head can only lead to confusion, possibly for some. Neuropsychological studies vary in degree and complexity and the control experiments usually yield what the scientist seeks, meaning they are meaningless. Is multilingualism advantageous or disadvantageous to the individual? The development of a second language may create a breakdown in the cognitive processes of the first language; it may force a decision making process between an idiomatic interpretation of an event and its reciprocal, the simple explanation. It may best explain the phenomena of code-mixing and code-switching that may not be available to the monolinguist, creating a more intelligible train of thought.
Week 6: Language, Thought, and Culture long answer choice, definitions
Q. What is linguistic specialization? Examples?
A. In order to best understand specialization, it pays to examine its opposite. The use of the word "relativity" found new meaning in the last century as Albert Einstein used it to describe some revolutionary concepts in space-time, the "continuum". The word automatically became a paradigm for just about every field in science and became a "frame-of-reference" to create meaning out of chaos. Translated to linguistics, it meant that one could take a particular word and transform it from its general meaning into a specific one, through everyday use by the population. The word loses meaning and becomes iconic to a particular symbol.
Q. What is linguistic relativity/the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? What is hard vs. soft linguistic determinism/relativity?
A. Benjamin Whorf attempted to make a particular language specific to a population that used it, the result being a cognitive interpretation of the universe completely ethnographically different from another population. Comparative analysis of Mendelian genetic population evolution to linguistic differences might reinforce the Whorf theory on a superficial basis but may not explain the innate cognitive worldview of the culture. It's a quantum leap to assume that a language creates a different worldview without considering evolution as a primary component. Between a scientific notion of special and general relativity and a free will argument of hard and soft determinism, linguistics attempts to rationalize a culture's cognitive understanding of its particular universe.
The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language, and is generally less accepted than the weaker version, which says that language only somewhat shapes our thinking and behavior.
Q. Why are the color studies NOT really good evidence for the S-W hypothesis/linguistic relativity?
A. First of all, color is a visual experience and to coin a phrase,
"in the eye of the beholder." It is no wonder that one culture might describe hue-saturation-luminance in one set of terms completely different than another. The remarkable difference is that one culture exists near the Arctic Circle and the other near the equator and naturally they would each have a noticeable difference in the visual experience. An Eskimo might be able to break down every color in the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, and the Haitian wouldn't have a clue what he was talking about, but be able to accurately describe every color in a coral reef. There is also a significant difference in what an artist might do to create a particular paint as opposed to what a house painter might do, both arriving at the exact same color through completely different means.
Q. In what domains does good evidence for linguistic relativity seem to be found?
A. relativistic effects in spatial orientation, temporal perception, number recognition, color discrimination, object/substance categorization, gender construal, as well as other facets of cognition.
Q. What is a terministic screen? Why do we use them?
A.
Q. What are some examples of how people have tried to “expose” what is behind a “screen” and create more equitable or fair language?
A.
Q. How might the use of terministic screens be
actively harmful?
A.
Week 7: Phonetics definitions, phonetics questions
Be able to read the IPA chart, and understand what we mean by voiced and voiceless
consonants (what is happening in the larynx) ?
Q. What do we mean by place of articulation? Manner of articulation? Know the basic regions of the vocal tract (see sagittal/head cross-section diagram , you will not need to label, but know, e.g. what ‘pharygeal’ or ‘velar’ refer to)
A.
Q. What are the 3 features of articulation for vowels?
Know how to describe a sound (e.g. [b] is a voiced bilabial plosive/ stop) and locate things on your IPA chart.
Be able to describe why foreign accents occur, by discussing how speakers ‘substitute’sounds
A.
Long Answer Questions
Choose one topic of 1 and 2:
1. Language, Thought and Linguistic Relativity: (notes + textbook chapter)
Q. Define linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and describe how is this NOT the same as “specialization.”
A.
Q. Why did studies of color NOT prove the S-W hypothesis/ linguistic relativity to be true?
A.
Q. Describe the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of the theory — why is ‘soft’ more likely
than ‘hard’ in terms of the evidence we have so far?
A.
Q. Describe, in detail, at least 2 different experiments which suggest the ‘soft’ version of the theory is likely.
A.
2. Language Ideologies and Indexicality:
Q. What does it mean that language is indexical?
A. It is relative to the observer: a first responder might see smoke and conclude fire. To a US Marine, "smoke" might indicate, by its color, the status of an LZ where his helicopter was about to land. If the Marine interpreted smoke meant fire instead of whether an LZ was secure or not, he might set the helicopter down into an ambush.There is no universal codified system that establishes what smoke means, in other words, indexicality is contextual.
Linguistic anthropology attempts to construct a system to analyze the use of language into a systematic discipline but may find itself caught in unintelligible loops. Deluded into thinking it is opening doors of perception, the study often finds it opens doors of deception. For some reason, there is a gap in understanding in the use of words such as "I", "here" and "now," which seem plain enough in any context. Combined into a sentence, "I am here now." is about as straightforward as one can get in a bona fide description of language use, without reading into it a plethora of hidden meaning. The cause of the paralogism can readily be traced to the investigator's preoccupation with overanalysis, when in fact, oversimplicity may well be the solution.
Q. Why is indexicality important for understanding how language might be a form of social action?
A.
Q. What is a language ideology — what four things might a language ideology concern?
A.
Q. Provide a clearly described example of a language ideology, and connect this back to how ideologies are really about more than language!
A.
Choose one topic of 3 and 4:
3. Language Socialization Cross-culturally (notes + Aheam Chapter Four)
Q. Briefly describe some major characteristics of American English child language socialization — what is the babytalk or caregiver register?
A.
Q. How do these patterns of socialization among American English speakers
differ from that of Kaluli children? List at least two major differences
A.
Q. Again, thinking of English vs. Kaluli socialization, explain the difference between dyadic vs. triadic socialization, and what child-raising vs. self-lowering practices look like.
A.
Q. What are some ways in which children, rather than adults, guide language
socialization? (e.g. why is it not always ‘top-down’) Provide two examples
A.
4.) Language Acquisition and NSL:
Q. What factors brought about the appearance and development of Nicaraguan Sign Language?
A.
Q. What can this case study tell us about the human capacity for language in general?
(e.g. discuss the “language acquisition device” and Universal Grammar)
A.
Q. What factors or conditions are essential for children as individuals as they are acquiring language?
A. Theories on language acquisition by children completely overlook a child's imagination. Here we see a conceptualization process that begins slowly as the child discovers stems, roots and morphemes. The process accelerates exponentially because only a child's imagination can move at the light speed required to learn a language, almost as if it had happened overnight. Thus, the notion of the built in software, or language acquisition device.
Q. Define pidgin and creole, and discuss why these kinds of languages are important in relation to NSL.