Powerful and Distrustful Questions
An open, arbitrary, conventional system of sounds/signs used for communication within a linguistic community.
Define accent, dialect, and idiolect.
Accent: the way in which speakers of a particular variety pronounce words and the rules that govern these pronunciations.
Dialect: a variety of language associated with a specific region or social group
Idiolect: an individual variety of language that incorporates all of the linguistic varieties—languages and dialects—that the person knows and uses.
Evaluate if the following statements are true or false:
1. Because ASL has more iconicity than oral languages, it isn't arbitrary and thus doesn't meet our definition of a language.
2. Deaf signifies membership to Deaf culture, while deaf only refers to hearing ability.
3. ASL is a system of gestures derived from Standard American English.
1. False
2. True
3. False
What is: 1. a descriptive view of language, 2. a prescriptive view of language, and 3. standard language ideology?
1. Descriptive grammar refers to the underlying structure of a language as it is used naturally by native speakers. Descriptive grammarians do not concern themselves with prescribing stylized ways of using language or declaring speakers “correct” or “incorrect,” but instead are interested in describing the principal structures of natural linguistic systems, Descriptive linguists infer rules from the language that people actually use and record the grammar accordingly.
2. Generally focused on formal, written language. These are the rules that are prescribed—set down, ordered, imposed—by those who write grammar books and style guides, Often based on older forms of English or even on the structure of other languages, these are also the rules that promote a nonvarying, nonchanging, standardized form of speech. In fact, those who look at grammar from a prescriptive view regularly believe that any type of linguistic change or variation is decay
3. A bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class
Gullah. What is ~generally~ its history, where is it spoken, what is its superstrate, and what are its substrates?
-The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of West Africans brought to work on plantations. Island isolation + slaveowners separating people who spoke the same languages were factors driving creolization.
-Spoken in the sea islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina (technically some NC and FL but mostly GA and SC)
-Superstrate: English. Substrates: West African languages
Define linguistic profiling and linguistic discrimination. What kind of test did John Baugh conduct for his research?
Linguistic profiling: using linguistic cues to make judgments about the speaker’s ethnicity sight unseen
Linguistic discrimination: acting on those inferences, denying goods and services in accordance with that profiling.
Matched guise test.
What is linguistic profiling and linguistic discrimination?
Linguistic profiling: making an assumption about an aspect of someone's social identity from only hearing their speech.
Linguistic discrimination: denial of goods and services, sight unseen, following linguistic profiling.
We watched 2 Ted Talks in this class. What were each of them about?
1. Anne Curzan "What makes a word real"
2. John Baugh "The Significance of Linguistic Profiling"
We watched lots of videos in this class. Name 5 and briefly what they were about. For double points, name 8+