Anthropology Test 4

communication

the process of taking a state of mind in one individual and transferring that idea to another individual

kinesics

the study of nonverbal communication; body language, facial expressions, spatial arrangement

call systems

sound communication among animals

language

communication using arbitrary symbols, and capable of communicating abstract or possible ideas

productivity

the ability of a speaker to create new words, meaningful to other speakers, to convey new ideas

displacement

the ability of a speaker to talk about things and events that are not immediately present

anthropological linguistics

the study of human language, and its role in human culture

subdivisions of anthropological linguistics

structural, historical, cognitive, and sociolinguistics

structural (descriptive) linguistics

the study of how language construct and transfer information

phonology

the part of structural linguistics that studies how sounds are used

phoneme

a set of sounds that a language groups together as interchangeable; changing sounds within the same phoneme does not change meaning

morphology

the part of structural linguistics that studies how meaningful sounds are put together to create words

morpheme

a set of sounds that carry a single indivisible meaning

bound morpheme

must be combined with others to have meaning

unbound morpheme

carries meaning independently

lexicon

a catalog of the bound and unbound morphemes in a language, and their meanings

atomic language

one whose lexicon consists of primarily unbound morphemes

synthetic language

one whose lexicon consists of primarily bound morphemes

syntax

the part of structural linguistics that studies how words are put together to create sentences

historical linguistics

the study of the history of language, how it changes, and what historical relationships exist among languages

language families

the pseudo-genealogical relationships of which languages have developed out of which others

proto-language

a language reconstructed by historical linguists, and theorized to be ancestral to modern languages, but otherwise unknown

linguistic divergence

a single language may diverge into 2 or more languages when culture geography, etc., lead 2 groups to begin speaking differently

focal vocabulary

a set of words describing a particular domain of experience

linguistic convergence

when cultures interact closely, their languages borrow from one another and become more simialr

cognitive linguistics

the study of how language reveals basic thought patterns

the sapir-whorf hypothesis

the theory that different languages produce different patterns of thought

sociolinguistics

the study of how social relationships are encoded in everyday speech; how language works in forming and maintaining social relationships