Ahearn's General Concepts
The attitudes, opinions, and beliefs that we all have about language.
What are Language Ideologies?
What is the Animator?
The idea that if a language doesn't have a word for a concept then speakers of that language do not/cannot think about that concept.
What is the Lexical Poverty Myth?
There is no purely linguistic reason to differentiate these two categories.
What are Dialects and Languages?
What is performativity?
The idea that language can do many different things in the world, sometimes at the same time.
The individual who an utterance is explicitly directed towards.
What is the Addressee?
What is Language Socialization?
When someone speaks using a manner of speaking that is not part of their normal repertoire of speech styles.
What is Language Crossing?
An individual's socio-culturally mediated capacity to act in the world.
What is Agency?
The mechanism by which ways of using language can mean more than just the denotative meanings of the words.
What is Indexicality?
The individual who composes the words that make up an utterance.
What is the Author?
The idea that language determines thought.
What is the Strong Sapir Whorf Hypothesis?
(why is this a misrepresentation?)
A language that arises where speakers of multiple mutually unintelligible languages come into contact through trade, colonization, or other global flows.
What is a Pidgin or a Creole?
The philosopher of language who originated the idea that language is performative in his Speech Act Theory.
Who is J.L. Austin?
The way that language can be used to comment on language.
What is the Metalinguistic Function of Language?
An individual who is able to hear an utterance but is not the intended hearer.
What is an Overhearer?
Adapting an environment to a child in the context of language learning.
What is Child-Centred Language Socialization?
The phenomena in which two languages are mutually unintelligible in the places where one language is spoken that are most geographically distant from the places where the other language is spoken, but are increasingly mutually intelligible as you get closer to the geographic mid point between the two language groups.
What is a Dialect Continuum?
A type of language used to performatively mark status difference.
This approach relies on the underlying idea that structures at the same time constrain and give rise to actions which in turn create, recreate, or reconfigure those same structures.
What is Practice Theory?
The individual who is responsible for the content and implications of an utterance.
What is the Principal?
Western Samoan mothers engage in this.
What is Situation-Centred Language Socialization?
The phases of Peter Auer's typology.
What are Code-switching, Language Mixing, and Fused Lects?
The idea that one's identity/status as a man, woman, or non-binary person is socially produced through language and other actions and signifiers.
What is The Performativity of Gender?