Study questions for quiz Monday, April 25th
Linguistic Anthropology
From the text book The Anthropology of Linguistics (AOL), lectures, and the reader Making Sense of
Language (MSL)
1) What is anthropology?
2) What does it mean that anthropology is holistic and comparative
3) Explain ethnosemantics and give some examples (AOL)
4) What is language? (AOL and lecture)
5) What is language’s connection with culture? (AOL, especially pages 29, 30, and lecture)
6) How is language studied, and what are the priorities in linguistics compared with
psycholinguistics compared with linguistic anthropology? (lecture)
7) What is theory of mind and why is it important to human language? (Film The Mind’s Big Bang,
AOL, lecture)
8) What do Koko/gorilla, Kanzi and his sister/bonobos, and Alex/ parrot show us about language
capabilities in some animals compared with humans?
9) If one of the design features of human language is arbitrariness (that there is no intrinsic
relationship between the form of a meaningful unit of language, such as a word and the concept
for which the unit stands) then do the examples in the videos show arbitrariness? Why or why
not?
10) If one of the design features of human language is cultural or traditional transmission (not
inheriting a particular language genetically) then do the examples in the videos show cultural
transmission? Why or why not?
11) If one of the design features of human language is displacement (that language allows speakers
to talk about the past, future, present and things physically distant), then do the examples in the
videos show displacement? Why or why not?
12) Why does Dunbar assert that human brain expansion may be related to social relationship
advantages more than strictly environmental survival and tool adaptation? (Article Why Gossip
is Good for You and lecture)
13) What is Dunbar’s evidence concerning neocortex size and group size? How does he correlate
grooming with social networking and group size? Why does Dunbar claim that language was
necessary to accommodate larger groups and how does gossip fit into his theory?
14) Why evidence does Dunbar use to propose that language might have evolved out of wordless
singing? (lecture)
From the film The Mind’s Big Bang
15) Consider what tool, art, and other technology tells us about language and culture, prehistorically
and historically.
16) What are some of the theories based in empirical evidence about how and why complex human
language started and expanded? (How might you compare these theories with those you are
reading about in the MSL articles?)
17) What are some of the biological connections with language discussed in the film? For example,
what did Steven Pinker say about the intelligence of earlier humans 40,000 years ago compared
with humans now?
18) What can we learn from deaf communities about language and human communities?
19) What are memes, the basic means for spreading memes, and the significant of memes for giving
humans agency in biological evolution?
20) What did you think about Susan Blackmore’s ideas about the power of memes and what that
might mean for humans? (TED video of Blackmore)
From lectures, the text book AOL, and the reader MSL
21) What were some of Franz Boas’s contributions to anthropology, but more specifically to
linguistic anthropology (AOL and lecture)
22) What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? (AOL and lecture)
23) What is linguistic relativity? (AOL)
24) What do metaphors tell us about linguistic/social categories and their influence on thought?
(AOL and the article Metaphors We Live By)
25) Be able to describe some of the ways linguistic anthropologists have worked to show how
language can influence worldview or thinking or perception. (Body parts, spatial cognition, color
categories, gendered nouns, lineality, etc .)
26) What are some arguments in opposition to the idea of linguistic relativity or the Whorf theory?
27) Know at least five of the terms and their descriptions for how humans articulate sounds.
(Example: approximates, bilabial, stops, nasals, etc. etc.)
28) Understand why the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and other phonetic charts and
systems are important, not only in linguistic anthropology, but in other disciplines. Be familiar
with what the IPA contains.
From the video lecture by Dr. Alexander Bergs and from the text book (AOL)
29) What is a phone? (AOL)
30) What is a phoneme (examples)?
31) What is phonology?
32) What is phonetics?
33) What is phonemics?
34) What is the purpose of slanted brackets?
35) What are minimal pairs and what is the minimal pair test (examples)?
36) What are allophones (examples)?
37) What do articulatory features have to do with the phonemes as the smallest, meaningdistinguishing units?
38) What is suprasegmental phonology? How are suprasegmentals indicated in linguistic
translation?
39) Be able to explain etics and emics (AOL)