linguistic anthropology exam 1

anthropology

systematic study of humanity, with the goals of understanding our evolutionary origins, our distinctiveness of species, and the great diversity in our forms of social existence across the world and through time

What are the 4 subfields of anthropology?

linguistic, biological, archaeological, and cultural

linguistics

the study of human language

linguistic anthropology

interested in speech use and the relations that exist between language and society/culture

modern myths of languages

unwritten languages are “primitive,” languages of non-industrialized societies have “little grammar,” the vocabularies of “primitive” languages are small and inadequate

language

primary means by which humans communicate

arbitrary

learned associations between words and what they stand for

expressive

utterance oriented towards the speaker (speaker talking to oneself)

conative

utterance directed towards the person you’re speaking to

referential

utterance directed towards third person or object (gossip) (talking about someone not present)

poetic

the utterance is directed towards itself (“that sounded so nicely worded”

Phatic

if the utterance is directed towards the social or physical channel that carries it (“testing 1, 2, 3”)

metalanguage

utterance is directed towards language itself (“how do you spell _____”)

phonology

the study of sounds used in speech, examines which sounds are present in language

phonetics

identifies and describes language sounds, pays attention to the tiniest details in the way language sounds are produced, tries to catalog every variation in sound that the speakers of language use, focused on phones and allophones

Phones

all sounds in a language

allophones

two sounds that are phonetically distinct but phonologically the same, considered by speakers to be the exact same sound

phonemics

analyzes the way sounds are arranged in language

phonemes

significant sounds contrasts in a language that serve to distinguish meanings

minimal pair

words that resemble one another in all but one pair (/p/it and /b/it)

place

where the air is being modified

manner

how the air is being modified

consonants

sounds in which the air stream is modified by some kind of constriction

vowels

less, or none at all, modifications to the air stream

paralanguage (prosody)

describes the sounds that occur alongside language, HOW something is said (and perhaps intended to be heard) rather than what is said

morphology

the study of words and how they are structured

morphemes

smallest unit of meaning in a language