Signs & Symbols
This type of sign refers to its object by similarity - like a drawing of a dog or computer icons.
What is an icon?
In the infamous "Eskimo words for snow" example, suburban white males supposedly have 100+ words for THIS instead.
What is "lawn"?
According to Schieffelin and Ochs, language socialization is THIS kind of process - meaning baby teaches parent and parent teaches baby.
What is mutual?
A speech community is any group with these THREE things: frequent interactions, shared verbal repertoire, and shared ___ ___.
What are social norms?
Max Weinreich famously said "A language is a dialect with" these two things.
What is an army and a navy?
Saussure distinguished between langue (language as system) and THIS - actual oral and written communication by members of a speech community.
What is parole?
"Roll Tide" pointing to University of Alabama, or smoke pointing to fire, are examples of this type of sign.
What is an index?
This scholar from the 1920s said language might "facilitate certain types of thinking" but doesn't prevent people from thinking differently.
Who is Franz Boas?
U.S. middle-class "baby talk" features higher pitch, replacing "R" with "W," and this repetition pattern - like "bye-bye" or "choo-choo."
hat is reduplication?
The study of how different speech communities use language is called this
What is ethnography of communication?
William Labov's famous study at Saks, Macy's, and Klein's in NYC found THIS sound became increasingly pronounced as you climbed the socioeconomic hierarchy.
What is the "R" sound?
Language has this capacity, according to Sapir (1924): "No matter what any speaker may desire to communicate, the language is prepared to do his work."
What is creative capacity?
The word "DOG" written on a flashcard is this type of sign, referring to its object by convention or habit.
What is a symbol?
This scholar said "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
Who is Edward Sapir?
DAILY DOUBLE!!
In U.S. middle-class homes, caretakers "self-lower" by simplifying utterances and do THIS by treating children as more linguistically competent than they are.
This alternative to "speech community" describes a multilingual community where people share an understanding of how language should be used even if they don't all speak the same language
What are speech areas?
When people seamlessly move between two languages in conversation - like "I need to go to the bank, ¿tienes dinero?" - this is called ___ ___.
What is code-switching?
Carol Cohn's 1987 study identified this type of language used by military defense strategists, with terms like "collateral damage" and "RVs" that distance speakers from war's horrors.
What is technostrategic language?
Words like "this/that," "I/you," and "here/there" are called these - they straddle the semantic-pragmatic divide.
What are deictics (or indexicals)?
Benjamin Lee Whorf said language and culture "have grown up together, constantly influencing each other" - and importantly, he and Sapir never formulated THIS.
What is a "hypothesis"? (They didn't create the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis")
In Samoa, according to Ochs (1986), houses have no walls, so THIS type of conversation is the norm rather than dyadic conversation
What is multiparty conversation?
McConnell-Ginet defined THIS alternative to speech communities as "an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor."
What is a community of practice?
This term describes when a community uses two codes (languages or dialects) that are hierarchically related, with each serving specialized functions - versus heteroglossia which involves MORE than two.
What is diglossia?
DAILY DOUBLE!!
This theory suggests that structures constrain and give rise to human actions, which then recreate or reconfigure those structures - involving both agency and structure.
According to Saussure, THIS is the system of shared rules governing a language's vocabulary, grammar, and sound system - the "language as thing."
What is langue?
In Boroditsky's study, Mandarin speakers were this many milliseconds faster at identifying the order of months when buttons were arranged vertically - spoiler alert: that's not much!
What is 170 milliseconds?
In Samoan language socialization, the lower-ranking person - often children - is responsible for doing THIS with their own unclear speech, unlike in U.S. contexts where caregivers guess.
What is clarifying (or interpreting their own speech)?
Speech communities have been criticized for having these SIX problems: tendency to take language as central, emphasis on consensus, preference for central members, focus on group, identity as static, and favoring of this...
What are researchers' interpretations?
African American English features like "He be singin'" demonstrate this grammatical form
What is invariant (or habitual) "be"?
Bakhtin (1981) said "All words have taste of profession, genre, tendency, party, particular work, person, generation, age group, day and hour" - arguing language is THIS, not dead.
What is living?
Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir never actually formulated a "hypothesis" together, but Whorf did argue that language patterns and cultural norms have grown up together doing this to each other - a bidirectional relationship, not determinism.
What is "constantly influencing each other"? (or "What is mutually constitutive?")