ANTHC15100 Midterm Terms

ethnolinguistic approach

employs anthropological techniques of gathering data from observations of people's daily lives and of attempting to understand behavior from the participant's point of view

sociolinguistic approach

discovers problems of linguistic variation

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linguistic anthropology

the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural reference

Phonology

the study of speech sounds in language

Phonetics

how you use your mouth and vocal system to create sounds

Phonemics

study of significant sound contrasts in a language to differentiate meaning

Morphology

structure of words and how words are formed

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language.

isolating language

A language which depends on word order rather than inflection to indicate grammatical relations

regular inflection

agglutinating

Syntax

The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language (most languages place the subject before the object)

Semantics

Meaning of words and sentences

agent

causes an action

patient

entity affected by an action

source

where the action originates

goal

where the action ends up

Kinesthetics

gesture, facial expression, eye contact, and body posture

Proxemics

touch and definitions of personal space

Miscommunications

when we think we know, not when we are aware we don't know

WSI

Warm Springs Indian

TCU

units that are grammatically and pragmatically complete

Turn constructional component

the elements that make a turn (words, phrase, sentence), and using context or tone as clues to start speaking

Turn allocation component

how the next speaker is chosen (either current speaker selects, the next speaker self-selects, or the current/last speaker keeps talking)

Adjacency pairs

two utterances spoken by two speakers, one after the other that are relatively ordered ("When are you going home? (first pair part)" "Tomorrow (second pair part)")

Symmetrical adjacency pair

A and B perform the same action (Hello-hello)

Asymmetrical adjacency pair

A's action presents B with a choice (Invitation --\> Accept/Reject)

Preference organization

In conversation analysis, refers to the preferred responses in a conversation.

self-repair

a speaker restates or revises a word or phrase to produce it in an error-free fashion or refine it to better reflect the intended meaning

other-repair

a spoken correction prompted by another person

Conversational analysis

a method used by linguistics to study how extralinguistic cues affect communication

Comparative evidence

How we acquire language through listening (cognitive acquisition processes) are universal, and the less structured the grammar is, the harder it becomes to learn

Acquisition of language

we learn languages by learning through what society teaches us (simply just “figuring out the language” through explicit instruction)

Socialization through language

learning a language through the norms and rules about a society (the process of teaching children how to be a specific member of a community or group by learning their traditions, norms, and culture)

Critique of Chompsky

caregivers are more than grammatical input providers

Critique of Ferguson

baby talk is not universal across cultures

Kaluli

* They are not treated as interactions partners
* Babies are helpless and adults don’t see a need to address utterances
* Because adults don’t engage in eye gaze, neither do the babies
* Believe you can’t guess what others think, os they don’t engage in utterance expansion and children are responsible for what they say

Samoan

* Houses don’t have walls, and instead have wood to lower at night
* Children are at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and elders are at the top (especially one from socratic families)
* Lower-ranking caregivers (usually siblings) take care if babies, and learn how to ask for their needs known to said caregiver 

Maintown

typical suburban middle class community, children are exposed to literacy very early, preschoolers announce their factual or fictional narratives, after three years interactive reading is discouraged

Roadville

white working-class community, children are successful in school in the early grades (the what-explanation phase), but then start lagging behind, since at home, they are NOT exposed to challenging of questions, and need to be taught the difference in structure of real events and fictional ones, and to be reintroduced to active participation in book reading

Trackton

black working-class community, treated like a human, children could have skills to succeed in advanced grades, but they fail in the first grades because they have not acquired at home literacy event skills to analyze the content (manipulate books, answer ques7ons about books) and the social interac7onal rules for SCHOOL literacy events and need to learn to label and give what-explanations, while retaining their analogical skills

the power of print

children learn to respect books, both physically with the pages and with moral respect

**Linguistic relatively**

the proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality, forms one part of the broader question of how language influences thought.

**Speech community**

a group of people sharing a common language. 

**Competence**

the mental knowledge of a language, the speaker's intrinsic understanding of sound-meaning relations as established by linguistic rules

**Performance**

that is the actual observed use of language – involves more factors than phonetic-semantic understanding

**Affixes**

grammatical or relational meaning 


1. Prefixes
2. Suffixes 
3. Infixes

One word utterances

passive language, each word has many semantic meanings and are heavily context-dependent (hi, dada, dada, nana, up, down)

Two word grammars

children realize that grammatical relations must be overtly expressed. This indicates a change in the child's mind (all-gone, bye, bye, more, pretty)

Open class words

nouns and verbs, meaning, intention, expressiveness (boy, sock, fan, boat, milk, plane)

Literacy events

occasions in which literacy (using printed/written words) is integral to interactions with socially established rules. ex) bedtime stories, stop signs, TV ads.