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Semantics
Study of meaning
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Manifestation of language
Speech/discourse
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Sign systems and the meanings that are associated with them are...
situation (context bound), that is to say they are culture specific
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"Jargon" refers to
technical terminology, specialized linguistic forms, or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
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While there are many definitions and descriptions of culture, the lecturer contrast two general types, those dealing with...
learning vs. transmission
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Meme
a replicator of cultural information transmitted from one person to another
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Characteristics of culture (8-ELASTICC)
- Ethnocentric
- Learned
- Adaptive
- based on Symbols
- Transmitted
- Integrated
- Constructed
- subject to Change
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Meaning of communication
takes place whenever people attached meaning to behavior, and out of awareness
dynamic and systematic process in which meanings are created and reflected in human interaction with symbols
transmission of (meaningful) messages from a sender to a receiver
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Language (according to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
A guide to social reality
Constrains our thought
Different languages entail different classifications of "reality"
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Linguistic competence is to performance as...
Language is to Speech
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A language is...
A set of symbols and rules for combining those symbols, used and understood by a community of people
- A system of signs by which humans communicate explicit messages, and it is the primary means for interaction between people
- The main way that humans remember the past, deal with the present, and anticipate and plan for the future
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Words do not really possess meaning, it is more accurate to say
people possess meaning and words elicit these meanings
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Linguistic competence is.... and must...
not available for direct observation
Must be inferred from performance
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There are three major sign types according to the lecturer...
icons, indexes, and symbols
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How many components and functions does the speech act have according to Hymes' scheme?
7 components, 9 functions
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7 Components of the speech act in Hymes' scheme
- Sender
- Receiver
- Message Form
- Message Channel
- Code
- Topic
- Context
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9 Functions of the speech act in Hymes' scheme
(Components: sender, receiver, message form, message channel, topic, code, setting/context)
- Identificational, expressive (sender)
- Directive, rhetorical (receiver)
- Poetic (message form)
- Contact (message channel)
- Referential (topic)
- Metalinguistic (code)
- Contextual (setting)
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Icon expresses relation of...
formal similarity between meaning and meaning carrier (form)
Image, diagram, and metaphor
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Index expresses relation of...
contiguity between meaning and meaning carrier (form)
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Metonym
entity that replaces another based on their mutual/shared occurrence in a given context (sign type: index)
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Symbol expressed relation based on...
a learned convention, or binding between meaning and meaning carrier (form)
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Ethnography of communication includes analysis of
speech habits, situational contexts, and cultural norms using in producing evaluating speech
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Discourse
events of communication (utterances, communicative events, messages with social and linguistic meaning)
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The speech act
minimal communicative acts employing verbal means (telling a joke)
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Speech event
composed of one or more speech acts, and characterized by having specifiable rules governing the use of speech
a joke (speech act) can occur in a lecture/formal introduction/sermon (speech events)
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Speech situation
a joke (speech act) could also occur within a conversation (speech event) at a party (speech situation)
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Speech community shares these three things
- Interaction
- Knowledge
- Attitudes
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Speech network
people in a speech network have contact with each other on a regular basis
weak networks and dense networks
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Ethnolinguistic approach
anthropological technique of observing people daily to understand behavior from the participants' point(s) of view
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Sociolinguistic approach
discovering patterns of linguistic variation and the dynamic connection between language and social factors
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Another expression referencing "phatic communion" is
getting together
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We learn about other people through what they...
say and how they say it
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We learn about ourselves through the ways that other people...
react to what we say
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We learn about our relationship with others through...
the give-and-take of communicative interaction
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Interrelationships between societal factors and language are extremely complex because (4 reasons)
multiple factors account for linguistic differences
sociolinguistic "rules" are actually statements of probability that can predict any single speech occurrence
individuals are not isolates of sociological factors (person is not simply male/female, child/adult, etc.)
Components of speech contexts influence speech
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Relevant features of the speech act component referred to as setting most often involve...
Participants, location and time
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Another model based in part on a mnemonic to amke the components easier to remember
Speaking model
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Speaking model
- Setting
- Participants
- Ends
- Act Sequence
- Key
- Instrumentalities
- Norms
- Genre
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Robbins Burling: Turkish beckoning gesture referred to as
digital rather than analog in nature
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Burling: Human language could not have evolved from any animal-like form of communication because
language is very different from all other animal behavior
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Burling: For humans, in speaking and hearing a language, sounds are...
Digital and either one phoneme or another
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Blum: For expressing our emotions and intentions...
gesture-calls are much better than language
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Burling: Chomsky shifted the focus of much of linguistics away from differences among languages and towards...
the universal features that are presumed to arise because of the universal nature of the human mind; a mind specifically designed for language
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Blum: Our digital and propositional language requires
much more learning than our analog and emotional calls and gestures
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Burling: Our massive word repertoire is one of the most distinctive characteristics of human language and humanity and this in turn depends on...
digital code (i.e. duality of patterning, double articulation, two levels of organization)
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Burling: Language is
pervasively conventional and arbitrary
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Burling: Syntax, with its subordination, embedding, relativization and other processes is responsible for...
a great deal of the productivity in language
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Burling: Humans have more control over our language than over..
our gesture calls
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Burling: Language allows for
displacement
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Burling: Spoken language is superior for every hearing person in that
It makes use of the ears and mouth
It interferes less with other activities
Can be understood in the dark
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Burling: "Quotable gestures" are gestures that can be
copied and attributed to others
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Burling: "Quotable vocalizations" are
Digital (vocal segregates)
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Burling: Gesticulation accompanies speech and differs from gesture-calls, quotable gestures, and from manual sign language. Gesticulation's apparent oral counterpart is used simultaneously with the words and sentences of language, and is intimately related to them. It conveys less propositional information than words and sentences, but reveals more about the attitudes and emotions of the speaker. It is
intonation (pitch, length, and loudness) that accompanies spoken language when not making phonemic distinctions
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Hockett: "Design features of language"
- Vocal-auditory channel
- Rapid feeling
- Broadcast transmission and directional reception
- Interchangeability
- Total feedback
- Specialization
- Semanticity
- Arbitrariness
- Discreteness
- Displacement
- Productivity
- Traditional transmission
- Duality of patterning
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Hockett: "Interchangeability" means
adult individuals both transmit and receive
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Hockett: Arbitrariness with respect to language structure generally means that
new linguistic messages are coined freely and easily
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Hockett: If a proto-homind's limited signal system includes AB=food, and CD=danger, then if one by accident says AC, this could come to mean
Food + danger
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De Saussure: The linguistic sign unites a concept and a
sound image
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Pinker: In comparing the genetic code in DNA, where four kinds of nucleotides are combined into 64 kinds of codons which can be strung into an unlimited number of genes, this refers to the fact that language makes
infinite use of finite media
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Pinker: In place of Robbins' use of "digital" and "analog" are
"Discrete" and "blending"
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Pinker: Because grammar is a "discrete combinatorial system"
an infinity of sentences can be produced
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Pinker: Markov chain models indicate that a human grammar is not and cannot be a
finite state model
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Chomsky: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" shows that
nonsense can be grammatical
improbable word sequences can be grammatical, well-formed sentences in English
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Pinker: A sentence is a tree, not a
chain
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Pinker: Words can be grouped together into phrases like
Twigs joined in a branch
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Pinker: A tree is modular, like
telephone jacks or garden hose couplers
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Embedding of one sentence within another (or repeated application of the same rule) is called
Recursion
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Pinker: Grammar shows us that there is nothing we can sense that is not first...
in the mind
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Pinker: Grammar is a protocol that has to interconnect the ear, mouth, and mind, three very different kinds of machine; it cannot be tailored to any of them, but must have an
abstract logic of its own
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Pinker: Syntax details have figured prominently in the history of psychology because they are a case where
Complexity in the mind is not caused by learning
Learning is caused by complexity in the mind
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Stokoe: Neanderthals, because they buried the dead and put artifacts into their graves while having a one tub supralaryngeal vocal tract, probably had a
gestural language
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Australian aborigines used signing as an alternative speech in normal conversations rather than only in
limited domains
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Stokoe: Signing is more likely than speaking to have been the means by which language was first
transmitted and acquired
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Robin Dunbar provides evidence that gossip played a significant part in
the evolution of spoken language
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Dunbar: A correlation between group size (hence complexity of the social world) and relative size of neo-cortex suggests that in evolutionary terms, it was the need to live in larger groups that has driven the evolution of
large brains in primates
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Dunbar: Neocortex and group size predicts a human group size of about
150
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Dunbar: Social grooming in non-human primate societies takes up
20-30% of their day
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Dunbar: With humans an increase in group size came with a shift in the
mechanism for social bonding
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Dunbar: Without language, one can only
groom one individual at a time
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Dunbar: With language, one can socially
groom several individuals at a time
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Dunbar: Language allows for social grooming while
traveling, eating, and working
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Dunbar: Gossip allows for the coordination of
social relationships
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Dunbar: Language may have evolved in the context of social bonding between
females
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Dunbar: Language lets us categorize people into types, so we can relate them without having to take days to work out the basis of a
relationship
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Who wrote the article in our reader called "The Orality of Language"?
Walter J. Ong
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The communication system known as language includes (3)
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Syntax
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Voice set, voice qualities, and vocal segregates are part of the communicative system known as
paralanguage
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Vocal segregates include
- Pause fillers
- Attention getting expressions
- Appreciation
- Disapproval sounds
- Back channel cues
- Cold signaling sounds
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Kinesics in communication includes
- Gesture
- Posture
- Facial expression
- Eye contact
- Walking
- Dancing
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Gestures inlcude
- Emblems
- Illustrators
- Affect displays
- Regulators
- Adaptors
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The study of proxemics includes
- Distance/proximity
- Height
- Direction
- Boundary markers/obstacles
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The study of haptics in communication includes
Touch
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Olfofactics include
Smell
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Chronemics includes
Time sense
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Savoristics includes
Taste
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Artifacts in communicative systems includes
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The phonemes of a language are
minimum meaningful units of sound in that language
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To say that the allophones of a phoneme are in complementary distribution is to say that the contexts of occurrence of the allophones are
mutually exclusive
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Allophone sets (alternative variants) and distinctive feature bundles (additive or compositional features) are both ways of defining
phonemes
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Prosidic features of language, aslo called suprasegmentals, operate primarily on the vowel nucleus, often affect or differentiate meanings, and include
Stress, Length, and Pitch
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Morphology is the study of
words and their structure
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Morphemes are generally composed of roots and
affixes
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Morphemes can be
- Lexical/free
- Grammatical/bound
- A root
- A stem
- Affixes
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A morphological typology classifies languages as
Isolating, agglutinating, or synthetic
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Syntax is the study of
Sentences and their construction
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Sentences usually have
A noun phrase and a verb phrase
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What articulatory parameters does American sign language employ in producing referential signs?
- Hand configuration
- Place of articulation with respect to signer's body
- Movement of hands in space
- Orientation of hands in relation to body
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If all human behavior is culturally constructed and all meaning culturally assigned, then a few, if any, gestures, body postures, or facial movements are likely to have
universal significance
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Kendon & Frieson: Affect displays are simply facial configurations which display
affective states
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Synchrony between the verbal and nonverbal streams of a speaker's language behavior is called
Self synchrony
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Close matching between movements of a speaker and movements of a listener is called
interactional synchrony
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While an unfamiliar gesture will cause discommunication, the false decoding of familiar gestures will produce
miscommunication
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Generally cross culturally, people of lower status in unequal encounters tend to be more
silent than those of higher rank
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Silence is an act of nonverbal communication that
Transmits many kinds of meaning, dependent on cultural norms of interpretation
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Among Wester Apache, silence as an act of nonverbal communication is the norm in situations of
ambiguity or uncertainty
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When a Navajo speaker renders "It is only good that I go there" as the Navajo equivalent of English "I must go there," it illustrates (3)
English speakers encode the rights of people control or be uncontrolled by other beings
English and Navajo speakers have different attitudes about rights and obligations
Navajo speakers give beings the ability to decide for themselves without compulsion by others
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English has many terms expression coercion: cause, force, oblige, make, compel, order, command, constrain, must, have to, ought to, etc. By contrast, Navajo
doesn't appear to have words of this sort
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A speaker's thoughts, beliefs, and action regarding the world are encoded in their (5)
- Lexicon
- Grammar
- Proverbs
- Myths
- Legends
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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different...
labels attached
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Before he was a linguist, Benjamin Whorf was an
insurance inspector
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The Hope language distinguishes direct sensory experience from inferred conclusions based on direct sensory experience and from reports provided by hearsay. We could call the forms involved
validity forms
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Whorf contrasted Hopi with English and concluded that Hopi and English have different ways of conceptualizing
Time
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A colt is
a male pre-adult horse
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Cultural interest is reflected strongly in our
naming and classification behavior
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Among other things the change in meaning of Tzeltal chih from "dear" to "sheep" illustrates that sheep became more important than deer over time, cultural interest can change through time, and
language change lags behind cultural change
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Categories are
an aggregate of words, all sharing a core meaning, related to a specific topic
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The fact that one person's "terrorist" is another's "freedom fighter" shows that naming can express cultural values and shared assumptions, reveal attitudes of speakers, and
create compatible attitudes in hearers
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Degrees of specialization and principles of classification within semantic domains indicate
cultural interest and discrimination
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Focal meanings of words and prototypes of categories demonstrate ways that people make sense of
the multitude of objects and events in their world
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The symbolic content of language, expressed in words and in metaphoric extensions, transmits and reinforces
complex social and cultural messages
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Ethnoscience refers to culturally constructed classification systems that organize knowledge of a society's world/universe (or the study of such a system), it includes Ethno-...
Botany, zoology, medicine, astronomy
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If a given language has a basic color for red, it implies that the language also has a basic term for
black and white
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The "best example" or "most typical" example, referring to the central sense of a word within a whole range of meaning that it has, is called the
focal meaning
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An idealized internalized conceptualization of an object, quality, or activity would be the
prototype
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People bring their social encounters a repertory of knowledge and understandings of their culture as expressed through their language. Some, but never all, of this will also be in the repertories of their interlocutors. This repertory has been called
cultural presuppositions
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The word "man" as in the English sentence "Man is only creature having language" is
semantically unmarked for gender and number, and morphologically unmarked for gender number
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If a language has a special suffix on all verbs in the present tense and no affix when those verbs are in past tense, then we could say about that language that past tense is likely to be earlier in
language acquisition and present tense is marked with respect to past
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The power of language is not only that values attached to words reveal attitudes of speakers, but also that words are used to create
compatible attitudes in hearers
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It has been said with some validity that all language use has a manipulative aspect to it in the sense that speakers employ words in order to have an effect on hearers, such as to convey information, ask questions, or issue commands, but the effect may be amplified because the words chosen are often not
neutral in their connotations
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The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is one thing standing for another on the basis of
similarity of some shared attributes
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A metonym involves one thing standing for another on the basis of
contiguity and shared occurrence in some context
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Personification is a common type of
metaphor
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When one says "This business needs some new blood" (and it isn't someone in a blood bank speaking), then they are using a figure of speech known as
metaphor
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Body part terms are in many societies extended to inanimate objects and to descriptions of activities. This is usually referred to as
metonymy
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Literacy is a system of
secondary signs, based on an oral semiotic system
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Street and Besnier claim that pictographic representation is
pre-writing
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Of three presumed basic types of writing systems, it is generally thought that they evolved in the order of
logographic, syllabic, alphabetic
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Chinese writing is not devoid of sound system references nor is it
purely pictographic
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Viewing literacy as a sociological construct, Street and Besnier identify two models:
ideological and autonomous
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Which sociologically constructed model has literacy distinguishing between "primitive" and "civilized"?
autonomous
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What do Street and Besnier suggest should be viewed not as a monolithic phenomenon, but as a multi-faceted one, whose meaning and consequences depend crucially on the social practices surrounding it?
Literacy
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The two statements "Speech is transient, writing is permanent" and "Speech, once uttered, can rarely be revised, or unuttered, but writing can be reflected upon, and even erased at will" suggest that they are
seemingly contradictory
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Based on the studies of Liberian Vai people and rural Appalachian people, literacy is deeply embedded in, and derives its meaning from the social practices which are most clearly articulated in
contexts of learning literacy
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Sequoya's syllabary is
one "invented" literacy
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Heath demonstrated, according to Street and Besnier, that in the three Appalachian communities, tensions between the literacy practices of middle-class, white working class, and black working class groups reflect and reinforce
inequality, oppression, and hegemony
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BL Whorf began his essay on the relationship of language to habitual behavior by explaining how some fires have been caused because
the words "empty" and "stone" suggest to many person that combustibility is not a present danger
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Whorf claims that "ten days" cannot be
objectively experienced
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In SAE there are count nouns and mass nouns. According to Whorf, in Hopi all nouns have an individual sense and both singular and plural forms, and there are no
"mass nouns"
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According to Whorf, in Hopi terms like "summer", "winter", "morning", and "sunset" are not nouns as in English, but rather
a kind of adverb
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While Hopi verbs have no tenses, Whorf insists that the three tense system of English
colors all of our thinking about time
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English and other SAE languages, according to Whorf tend to
subjectivize everything
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According to Whorf, the Hopi microcosm seems to have analyzed reality largely in terms of events (or "eventing") referred to in two ways:
objective and subjective
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Whorf: the "quality of reality" that "matter" or "stuff" has for us may correspond to the Hope emphasis on
preparing or being prepared
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Whorf: our objectified view of time is favorable to
historicity and everything connected with keeping records
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Whorf avers that Hopi rarely
gesture at all
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Whorf concludes that concepts of "time" and "matter" depend on the nature of one's language, there is no such striking difference between Hopi and SAE about space as about time, and "space" is probably apprehended in substantially the same
form irrespective of language
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Dorothy Lee: People of the Trobriand Islands appear to favor
pattern over lineality in their perception of reality
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Trobriand describe their village as "aggregate of bumps" and their language has no
adjectives or tenses
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Lakoff and Johnson view "Argument is war", "Time is wasted", and "Speed is deadly" as conceptual metaphors based on
linguistic evidence
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Levinson calls the widespread presumption in cognitive sciences that language is essentially innate
"simple nativism"
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Hotchkiss notes that in Teopisca people take measures to ensure some degree of secrecy, houses are oriented inward, children are u
sed as "spies" and viewed as "non-persons"
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Hotchkiss believes privacy and secrecy are strategies for protecting one's reputation in a small community. He further suggests that this is the basis for
the strategic use of children to run errands
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Hotchkiss sees children as
"nonperson" and therfore less likely to be seen as invading privacy or compromising secrecy
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Hotchkiss: a child go-between may indeed be aware of the truth, and the adult may know that the child knows, but the adult doesn't
have to be as delicate in behavior in front of a child as they would in front of an adult
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When a child in Teopisca returns from an errand:
he/she is extensively debriefed by an adult of the household to see what he/she has learned on the errand
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Hotchkiss considers some acts of children as
integral to certain aspects of social relations among adults
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