Anthropology 100 Language
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- ex. uh-oh, well, uh
- voice segregates
- indicate power of who we are speaking to, we evaluate people based on how they speak
- vertical dialects
- codes, rules, structure
- Language
- a set of words and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups
- focal vocabulary
- significant units of sound (consonants and vowels), significant sound contrast used to determine meaning, as in minimal pairs, all languages use approx. 50 phonemes, implies there was an origin language
- phonemes
- how that language conveys its message, through form classes, syntax, etc.`
- surface structuer
- languages developed out of the same parent language; ex. French and Spanish both daughters of Latin
- daughter languages
- words can change meaning, belong to different categories (verbs, nouns, adjectives), english doesn't change according to different situations
- form classes
- the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences, organization of morphemes so that they are logically coherent
- syntax
- being able to hear individual words instead of just a string of sounds
- duality of patterning
- communication acts
- Speech
- voice qualifiers like laughing, crying (these are universal)
- vocalizations
- language ancestral to several daughter languages
- protolanguage
- tracing language families by looking for common vocabulary features (core vocabularies), used to trace origins of groups and their imigrations
- glottochronology
- vocabulary; a dictionary containing all the morphemes in a language and their meaning
- lexicon
- proxemics, kinesics, paralanguage, vocalizations, voice segregates
- the gesture-call system
- study of communication through gesture, body posture, etc. many of these traits are inherited and shared with our primate ancestors
- kinesics
- nessage that needs to be conveyed, relationship between the ideas being expressed
- deep structure
- connections between words and meanings
- arbitrariness
- transmitting information by any means
- communication
- transmitted and acquired through traditions and social context
- traditional transmisson
- the frames around words: pitch, voice, qualities, rhythm
- paralanguage
- productivity, duality of patterning, displacement, arbitrariness, traditional transmission
- design features of language
- language has unlimited messages that can be conveyed
- productivity
- ability to talk about events or agents that are not in the present or immediate environment
- displacement
- how people use space to convey messages
- proxemics
- created by Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir. Believed that languages embody models of the world, influence the way hearers and speakers understand existence of self. It developed out of the discovery that Hopi has no tenses, english emphasizes time and extreme opposites. Example: drum filled with flammable material
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- auditory and visual centres allow us to bypass endocrine and hormonal repsonses so that we can create symbols between what we see and what we hear
- organization of the brain
- units of meaning ex. dog has one morpheme, dogs has two, includes suffixes and prefixes
- morphemes
- humans are the only species whose larynx moves after birth, it moves lower as you get older to prevent food going down the windpipe and allows for a greater variety of sound
- origins of language
- study of language in social context; speech acts, language and power
- sociolinguistics