College of Wooster Linguistic Anthropology SP2024

culture

a set of rules or standards shared by members of a society

society

a group of people who occupy a specific locality and who share a common cultural tradition and language

ethnocentrism

the belief that one’s own culture is superior in every way to all others

paralanguage

characteristics of vocal communication that do not have lexical meaning

kinesics

the study of body language

proxemics

the study of cultural patterning of the spatial separation individuals maintain in face to face encounters

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

also known as linguistic relativity, this theory is focused on the relationship between language and the mind

phoneme

the smallest meaningful distinctive sound unit of a language

protolanguage

reconstructed parent languages

language family

a group of languages descended from a single ancestral language

morpheme

smallest unit of meaning in a language

Frank Siebert Jr.

scholar who argued that in the absence of historical records extending several thousand years into the past, it was possible to discover where the speakers of Proto-Algonquian originally lived

Critical Age Hypothesis

a claim that language is acquired with ease before puberty because of brain plasticity in childhood

neurolinguistics

the branch of linguistics concerned with the role the brain plays in language and speech processing

code-switching

the mixing of words, phrases, and sentences of multiple languages or dialect

cuneiform

writing of the Sumerians

isogloss

a boundary line between places or regions that differ in a particular linguistic feature

diffusion

the dissemination of elements of culture to another region or people

lingua franca

language agreed upon as a medium of communication by people who speak different first languages

pidgin

a form of spoken communication with a greatly reduced grammar and limited vocabulary

parole

the individual speaker’s knowledge of the langue

communicative competence

knowledge of what is and what is not appropriate to say

ethnography of communication

the nature and function of communicative behavior in the context of culture

speech act

the minimal unit of speech for purposes of an ethnographic analysis

ethnoscience

uncovering the lexical classification of the social and physical environments of speakers of a language