Language and Society Reading Quiz Answers

A ______ approach toward language considers some common kinds of language use “correct” and other common kinds of language use “incorrect.”

prescriptive

A ______ approach analyzes how people talk without making value judgements.

descriptive

To linguists, the term slang refers to…

words

It is always easy and uncontroversial to decide whether two related ways of speaking should be considered different languages or dialects of the same language.

False

Sociolinguists define a _____ as a group of people who share social conventions about language use.

speech community

Although the “standard” variety of a language is usually considered mos prestigious (people think its speakers sound smart, powerful, etc.), non-standard varieties are sometimes also valued for their connotations and local associations (e.g., a speaker of a working-class dialect sounds tougher or more street-smart). Trudgill labeled this value placed on non-standard varieties “_____ prestige.”

covert

_______ studies investigate language attitudes by playing recordings of same people speaking two different ways and asking the research participants (who think they’re hearing different people) to rate the speakers on characteristics like intelligence,friendliness, etc.

Matched guise

Name some linguistic elements commonly deleted in “Hollywood Injun English” (HIE)

tense marking, subject pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries

Recent research on the English spoken by present_day indigenous North Americans has found a unitary variety of “American Indian English” (AIE) without significant dialectal variation between different indigenous communities

False

If people speaking a number of different varieties of the same language migrate and mix together in a new place, after a few generations, the whole community may end up speaking the same way, following a process called _____.

dialect leveling

One commonly discussed area of variation that the English settlers brought to North America is whether or not all /r/ sounds are pronounced. A dialect that does pronounce all /r/s can be described with two synonymous terms:r-ful or _____.

rhotic

Language varieties used in isolated speech communities…

often maintain older forms byt nevertheless change over time, if slowly

A(n) _____ is the stereotyped pronunciation of a single word or phrase that comes to represent a speech community, like eejit for idiot in Irish English.

shibboleth

When a dialectologist finds a consistent difference in the frequency of two synonyms (e.g., pail vs. bucket) and draws a line on a map between the area where most people say pail and the area where most people say bucket, that line is called a(n): _____. (A bundle of those lines leads to the dialectologist posting a boundary between dialect regions.)

isogloss

Data for the article by Coats on double modals came from…

a corpus of transcripts from YouTube videos

Before the study by Coats, linguists had…

been studying double modals in a sustained manner since the 1970s

Double-checking by humans showed that automated analysis of the data identified actual examples of double modals…

about 30% of the time

The results of the Coats study demonstrated that in North America, double modals are used…

most frequently in the Southeastern U.S., but also occasionally almost everywhere in the U.S. and Canada

The Coats study found the same use of double modal constructions that had previously not been attested in the U.S.

True

When a linguistic construction can be produced two or more different ways (e.g., running v.s. runnin’), the construction (the set of all its ways is called a variable, and each of those ways is called a _____.

variant

The basic but oversimplified pattern of sociolinguistic variation related to social class is that ways of speaking associated with higher-status groups acquire _____ and ways of speaking associated with lower-status groups acquire _____.

prestige, stigma

Which type of society is more likely to have a lot of prescriptive rules that many people are aware of and try to follow?

a society with a significant possibility of social mobility

Regional and social variation interact in that local language features are likely to be associated with the _______ speakers in the community.

working class

The pronunciation by some AAE speakers of the word ask as [aeks] is…

a feature of Old English that has been retained

_____ is when members of one ethnic group use linguistic features that are characteristic of a different ethnic group (without the intention of mocking that group or trying to pass for a member of that group).

Crossing

Linguists have reached a clear consensus on how AAE originated and developed.

False

The sentence structures of AAE differ from other varieties of English in ____ ways.

systematic

In AAE, the verbal marker be (which doesn’t change form with different subjects)

indicated a recurring or habitual activity or state

Rachel Jeantel’s role in the trial discussed in the Rickford & King aticle was a _____.

witness

According to Rickford and King, the idea that vernacular varieties of English might be misunderstood in courtroom contexts is…

AAVE with some Caribbean influence

Rickford and King consider the jurors’ difficulty in understanding Rachel Jeantel likely to stem from…

unfamiliarity with her language variety, difficulty hearing her in the courtroom, and negative stereotypes

Rickford and King end the article by saying that ______ should do more to improve the situation.

linguists

At the time of the interviews that made up the core data for the Rickford and McNair-Knox article, Foxy was ____ years old.

18

When Faye McNair-Knox interviewed Foxy, who else took part in the conversation?

her daughter “Roberta”

Foxy used _____ AAVE features when interviewed by Beth than when interviewed by Faye McNair-Knox.

fewer

When Faye McNair-Knox conducted the interviews, Foxy’s language use was very consitent over the years in terms of the frequency of AAVE features.

False

Overall, Rickford and McNair-Knox consider that their findings are consistent with Bell’s theory of audience design.

True