ANTHROPOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
For questions 1-13, 17-25 and 27-32, fill in the blanks with appropriate words and
phrases given in the following chart.
*Relativism
*connectionism
*holistic
*indexicality
*social cognition
*communicative event
*indexicality
*cultural practices
*incommensurability
*the actual use of a language
*Linguistic anthropology
*Kinship
*sociolinguistics
*evolution of human *use of the linguistic system
*social actors *analytical
*competence
*performance
*neurological
*structuralist linguists
*language instinct
*speech activity
*velum
* langue
*tongue
*parole
* palate
*larynx
*participation
*cognitive sociology
*Cognitive anthropology
*Levi-Strauss
*Boas
*Kant
*Saussure
*Chomsky
*color terminologies *eleven
*hue *Prague
*brightness *two
Structuralism
Papuan languages
child language acquisition
*culturally mediated conceptual schemes
*something creative, realized, achieved
*doing of things with words
Read Chapter 1 (The Scope of Linguistic Anthropology) and answer the following
questions.
1- _____________________is often presented as one of the four traditional branches of
anthropology (the others being archaeological, biological or physical, and sociocultural
anthropology).
2- What is unique about linguistic anthropology lies in its interest in speakers as
________________, in language as both a resource for and a product of social interaction, in
speech communities as simultaneously real and imaginary entities whose boundaries are
constantly being reshaped and negotiated through myriad acts of speaking.
3- Linguistic anthropology is partly built upon the work of _____________________, but
provides a different perspective on the object of their study, language, and ultimately shapes a
new object. Such a new object includes the “_____________________” discussed by formal
grammarians who underscore the biological foundations of the language faculty (Pinker
1994), but it also manifests a different set of concerns and hence a different research agenda.
4- In the last twenty years, the field of linguistic anthropology has grown to include or draw
from a vast array of other fields including folklore and performance studies, literacy and
education, _____________________, interactional sociology, _____________________,
and_____________________.
5- Among the disciplines in the social sciences and humanities that study communication,
_____________________is the closest to linguistic anthropology.
6- There are three major theoretical areas that have been developed within linguistic
anthropology in the last few decades. Each of these areas is devoted to the understanding of
one of the following analytical notions: (i) performance, (ii) _____________________, and
(iii) participation.
7- The concept of performance draws from a number of sources and can thus be interpreted in
a number of ways. One use of the term originates in the theoretical work of Noam Chomsky
and the distinction he made in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) between
_____________________and _____________________. This distinction was in part inspired
by de Saussure’s contrast between _____________________and _____________________
(Saussure 1959), with the first being the system as a whole, independent of particular uses by
particular speakers, and the second the language of a particular user of the system. In this
context, competence describes the capacity for language, that is, the knowledge – mostly
unconscious – that a native speaker has of the principles that allow for the interpretation and
use of a particular language.
8- Performance, instead, is _____________________and is not only seen by Chomsky as
based upon competence but also following principles such as attention, perception, and
memory which do not need to be invoked for the notion of competence as the abstract
knowledge speakers have independent of their use of language. Competence in this case is the
knowledge of a language that an ideal speaker has. Performance instead is the implementation
of that knowledge in acts of speaking.
9- Chomsky’s notion of performance is “_____________________”.
10- Austin’s notion of performance is “_____________________”.
11- Hymes’ notion of performance is “_____________________”.
12- Indices (or indexes, as most scholars prefer today) are signs that have some kind of
existential relation with what they refer to. This category can be easily extended to linguistic
expressions like the demonstrative pronouns this, that, those, personal pronouns like I and
you, temporal expressions like now, then, yesterday, and spatial expressions like up, down,
below, above. The property of these expressions has been called
_____________________and has been shown to extend to much of linguistic communication.
13- To be a competent speaker of a language means to be able to do things with that language
as part of larger social activities which are culturally organized and must be culturally
interpreted. The notions of _____________________, speech event, and
_____________________are some of the notions used in the past to capture this basic idea.
The concept that is currently used to capture the fact that speaking is part of larger activities is
_____________________. This notion stresses the inherently social, collective, and
distributed quality of any act of speaking. To speak a language means to be able to use sounds
that allow us to participate in interaction with others by evoking a world that is usually larger
than whatever we can see and touch at any given moment.
Read Chapter 1 (Meaning, Cognition and the Domain of Anthropological Linguistics)
and answer the following questions.
14- What is anthropological linguistics? What is the difference between anthropological
linguistics and sociolinguistics? Explain the difference by giving an example.
15- What is culture?
16- What is icon? What is index? What is symbol? Explain them by giving examples.
Read Chapter 2 (The Evolution of Language) and answer the following questions.
17- The _____________________seems to have been a multicausal process. These were the
social factors identified by Aiello and Dunbar (1993) and Reynolds (1993), the cognitive
interdependences between manual action and language discussed by Corballis (1991),
Greenfield (1991) and MacNeilage (1992), and the neurological developments from a primate
to human brain explored by Deacon (1992b) and Ringo (1991).
18- There are some _____________________ and anatomical bases of language and speech.
19- It is not exclusively true to say that the language capacity is located entirely in the left
hemisphere. While the _____________________aspects of language such as phoneme
recognition and the production, processing, and generation of sentence structure definitely are
found in the left hemisphere, the more _____________________or analogical aspects of
language are, indeed, in the right hemisphere. For example, prosodic aspects of speech such
as rhythm, emphasis, and intonation are strongly associated with the right hemisphere, as is
the understanding of metaphors or jokes, which require an analogical rather than sequential
type of reasoning for comprehension .
20- In addition to the brain, the other major organs necessary to spoken language are those of
the vocal tract. The human vocal tract is very different from the oral cavity of any other
primate. First, our _____________________is much lower in the throat than that of other
primates (Lieberman 1991). This, plus the curvature of the oral cavity above the larynx,
increases the size of the resonance cavity, allowing humans to articulate distinctly many
vowels. The _____________________also can close off the passage to the nose, allowing
humans to produce a contrast between nasalized and non-nasalized sounds. Our
_____________________and lower jaw are reduced in length compared to other primates.
Finally, humans have a _____________________distinct from all other mammals (Lieberman
1991); it is round and forms both the floor of the mouth and the front of the pharynx.
Read Chapter 3 (Mind, Universals, and the Sensible World) and answer the following
questions.
21- _____________________'s great achievement was his reconciliation of
rationalist/Platonic views with the opposing ideas of empiricist philosophy, which held chat
knowledge was acquired by practical sensible experience and not conferred by innately
endowed reason. This school is represented in the Western tradition mainly by British
philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and continues to be highlv influential
among English-speaking philosophers today.
22- For _____________________, the role of sensible experience in determining the form of
language is quite marginal; its structure is mainly projected from the innate and universal
mental structures.
23- Approaches invoking mental representations are dominant within all cognitive disciplines
today, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. But there are recent challenges to the theory of
mental representations in the forms of alternative theories which dispense with them. These
alternative theories are _____________________and enactionism.
Read Chapter 4 (Structuralism) and answer the following questions.
24- _____________________is a school of thought within the social sciences which holds
that the elements of a system have no significance in themselves, only in relationship to the
other elements of the system. Thus, /b/ is an element of the English phonemic system because
it contrasts with other such elements; bat contrasts with cat as distinct English words. This
idea of functioning contrast was developed into the formal idea of opposition in the work of
the Prague School, defining elements in a system as the points of intersection of multiple axes
of opposition, represented as the +/- poles of binary features. This idea of binary features was
taken up by _____________________and wedded to a strong rationalist agenda as the basis
for his structural anthropology. The function of human minds everywhere is to classify, and
they do this in terms of a finite, universally available series of semantic oppositions which
underlie all cultural categories, such as nature versus culture. Because all human minds are
ultimately the same, due to the doctrine of the psychic unity of humankind, all cultures are
underlyingly organized in the same way, via the universal set of semantic oppositions, the
apparent differences being due simply to varying arrangement of these oppositions.
25- The structural linguistics which influences Levi-Strauss stems from three sources:
_____________________, a Swiss linguist whose posthumous Course in General Linguistics
(1959[1916]) was highly influential; the _____________________School, specifically
through the work of Jakobson; and American descriptive linguists, mainly
_____________________.
Read Chapter 5 (Cognitive Anthropology) and answer the following questions.
26- What is partonomy? Explain it by giving an example.
27- _____________________is an American school of structuralism that developed out of
earlier Boasian work in linguistic anthropology. It holds that culture is to be reduced to
cognition and is interested in the mental representation of cultural practices, rather than the
behavior itself, a clear Platonic position.
Read Chapter 6 (Kinship) and answer the following questions.
28- _____________________has long been a cultural domain within which anthropological
linguists have sought to identify universal constraints, for the _____________________which
kinship seeks to label, namely mating and reproduction, are features of all human societies.
The debate has revolved around whether these universals can be stated in the strictly
biological terms of mating and reproduction without recourse to social and ultimately cultural
categories. The core of kinship has been identified as the reproductive mother-child
relationship and only secondarily the mating husband-wife relationship, Kinship is built on
complex chains of linking of these two types of relationships, but the actual labels for
individual relatives within this elaborate kinship network, the local kinship system, will vary
across languages.
Read Chapter 7 (Color) and answer the following questions.
29- The simplest system of color naming found in any language consists of two terms
(considering the basis of the color domain in oppositions, it is impossible to conceive of a
simpler system and still call it "color"). This is exemplified in _____________________of
New Guinea like Dani and Australian languages, such as Burara. Dani has two basic color
terms - mili and mola: mili contains black and darker browns and all the cooler colors, greens
and blues; mola covers white and the warmer colors, reds, yellows, orange, reddish-purple,
pink and lighter browns. On the basis of these findings, Rosch argued that these terms denoted
both _____________________and _____________________, glossing them as mola
DARK/COOL and mili LIGHT/WARM, where COOL and WARM described the cool (green,
blue) and warm (red, yellow, orange) hues.
30- The systems of _____________________among the languages of the world present a
promising case for the establishment of universals in human categorization, due to the
panhuman neurophysiology of human vision. The thrust of work in the tradition stemming
from Berlin and Kay (1969) has been to prove exactly this claim, locating established
universals in the systems of basic color terminologies in the mechanisms of human color
vision and arguing further that cultural interests and practices play no role. They have
determined a typology of basic color terminologies varying from a minimum of
_____________________terms up to a maximum of _____________________, with the
actually attested systems restricted to a very small and mainly predictable subset of the very
large set of theoretically possible, but actually unattested, types, a finding strongly in support
of universal constraints in this domain.
Read Chapter 8 (On Relativist Understanding) and answer the following questions.
31- _____________________is a philosophical position which claims that experience in the
form of culturally mediated human interests plays a crucial and determinative role in
cognitive functioning; it is to be contrasted with universalist rationalism, which contrarily
emphasizes innate biological and psychological determinism. Relativism claims that
knowledge is obtained through ____________________________________.
32- The indeterminacy of translation due to different underlying conceptual schemes is the
basis of the _____________________problem, but we must beware of jumping to too radical
conclusions; indeterminacy does not mean impossibility. Putnam (1981) and Davidson (1984)
point out the background of shared, rough, working assumptions about the world which is
necessary for even indeterminate translation. Some rough, at least partial, translation is always
possible between any two languages (and between any two cultures, otherwise anthropology
as a discipline could not exist).
Read Chapter 9 (Models and Metaphors) and answer the following questions.
33- What is a metaphor? Explain it by giving an example.
Read Chapter 10 (Linguistic Relativity and the Boasian Tradition) and answer the
following questions.
34- Look at the following diagram. Explain Whorf’s theory of “Cognitive Appropriation” and
his example of empty gasoline drums.(Why do speakers of English smoke cigarattes near
empty gasoline drums?)
35- Explain Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.