4: Language and Culture- Pearson Cultural Anthropology

Nonhuman primates use call systems to do which of the following?

signal a predator is nearby, express emotion, and indicate the location of a food source

Why have researchers attempted to teach nonhuman primates visual forms of language rather than spoken language?

Nonhuman primates do not have the physical vocal structures necessary to produce human spoken language.

Which of the following statements about the productivity feature of language is true?

The number of unique utterances possible in human language is unlimited.

The fruit called "apple" in English is called "manzana" in Spanish and "pomme" in French. What does this example illustrate about the nature of human language?

The association between sounds and what they represent is arbitrary.

Why are animal sounds that indicate food sources considered similar to human utterances that involve displacement?

They reference objects that are not in the immediate vicinity.

In what way is a phoneme different from a phone?

It is the minimal unit of sound that serves to distinguish the meaning of one word from another.

Why is the concept of "interactional meaning" important in linguistics?

because the same words can have different meaning depending on the speakers' relationships and the setting and context of the linguistic exchange

In English, word order often follows this pattern: subject, verb, object. This pattern would be of interested to someone studying which of the following?

syntax

According to universal semantics, which units of meaning would apply to the term "mare"?

countable, nonhuman, adult

What argument supports the proposition that "-ed" is a morpheme in English?

It is a set of sounds that conveys the meaning of past tense.

Humans and primates show similarities in which of the following forms of nonverbal communication?

the expression of emotion through facial cues

What effect has globalization had on the human use of gestures?

A few gestures have been adopted widely throughout the world across many different cultures.

Which of the following distinguishes an emblem from other forms of body language?

An emblem has acquired a specific meaning and may be substituted for spoken words.

What action might a person from the United States take in order to assert dominance in a conversation?

bring their face very close to the other person's face

Based on the findings of both the Israeli study concerning intercultural communication and primate studies of nonverbal communication, which of the following would be a legitimate conclusions?

Much of human, nonverbal communication is the result of cultural learning rather than biological predisposition.

Linguistic diversity in the United States is primarily the result of which of the following?

a history of immigration

Which of the following statements about African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is correct?

AAVE has fully developed rules of syntax.

In addition to curbing the loss of indigenous languages, revitalization programs can be expected to have which of the following results?

the preservation and transmission of indigenous beliefs, values, and knowledge

Which of the following statements summarizes the basic premise of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

The way people think is influenced by the language they speak.

What is the particular strength of the Bridge AAVE-based reading program?

It combines cultural and linguistic aspects of reading that are familiar to the children.

Which of the following illustrated a communication failure based on the misunderstanding of cultural presupposition?

An American responds to a passerby's query of "How are you?" with a detailed account of his current medical problems.

An "ethnography of communication" would include which of the following?

detailed descriptions of the participants, setting, and topics of discussion related to a specific speech event

Which of the following differentiate computer-mediated communication (CMC) from other forms of written communication?

Participants regularly use abbreviations and sentence fragments.

Which of the following would you expect to discover from the componential analysis of a language used in an agricultural society?

a vocabulary with specialized words for farming tools, types of soil, and stages of plant development

How do cultural presuppositions and pragmatics assist in human communication?

Spoken language allows room for multiple interpretations. Cultural presuppositions and pragmatics help speakers convey the particular meanings they intend.

Proponents of linguistic nationalism would advocate for which of the following?

preventing the adoption of loan words from other languages

What is usually responsible for "linguistic lag?

the inability of a language to keep up with changing cultural beliefs and practices

What is the distinction between dialects and languages?

Dialects are mutually intelligible; languages are not.

Which of the following correctly states the relationships among creoles, pidgins, and lingua francas?

Creoles can develop from pidgins. Pidgins and creoles may become lingua francas.

The English word "mother" is "mutter" in German and "matar" in Sanskrit. What does the similarity of these words indicate?

The words are cognates, and the languages are likely to be related.

What purpose would multilingualism serve in a small-scale society?

to facilitate social and economic exchanges with other cultural groups

Why are some educational programs in Peru translating world literature into Quechua?

to increase the public use of Quechua and offset its decline

What accounts for the current wide use of Spanish and French throughout the world?

the legacy of former colonial powers

Which of the following would you recommend to a community that wishes to revitalize a vanishing language?

Teach the language in school, translate reading material into the language, and host community celebrations during which the language is spoken.

What impact do you expect Internet use to have on the diversity and distribution of human languages?

Internet use in some cases will encourage linguistic homogeneity rather than diversity.

The displacement feature of human language makes which of the following possible?

telling someone about what happened yesterday

What was the basic assumption of the 1996 Oakland, California, project in which African American children were taught in both Ebonics and Standard English?

Children would master concepts better if they learned them in their primary dialect. This would aim them in mastering Standard English.

Which statement best summarized the effect of globalization on the languages of the world over the past 500 years?

The total number of languages has drastically decreased, with a few languages becoming globally dominant.

Pidgins differ from creole languages in that they have which of the following?

simpler syntax and reduced vocabularies

In American advertising, men often assume dominant postures, and women assume deferential postures. What is this an example of?

nonverbal gender-specific behavior

Unlike other forms of animal communication, human language allows speakers to do which of the following?

transmit cultural knowledge

Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar is linked to which of the following ideas?

The human brain has a built-in capacity for language learning.

Which of the following procedures would help determine the phonemes in a language?

Compare nearly identical words in order to isolate the smallest sound components that differentiate their meanings.

Which of the following statements about intercultural communication is accurate?

As with spoken language, the meanings of gestures, intonations, and body language vary from one culture to the next.

If people in two regions speak the same language but use different pronunciations for some words and some different words to name the same object, you would say they speak different _____________.

dialects

According to John Lucy's study on language and cognition, a Yucatec adult would classify which of the following objects as similar?

a carved rock and a stone fence

Which of the following describes the process through which one dialect of a language becomes the standard for a society?

People begin to see the dialect used by the elite members of society as the correct form of the language, while other dialects come to be considered inferior.

Which of the following indicates a violation of a cultural presupposition involving the pragmatics of communication?

A New Yorker responds to the question "How are you?" with a lengthy discourse about his health.

Which of the following would support an argument that effective communication is more difficult to achieve through an exchange of emails than in person?

Meaning is conveyed through both verbal and nonverbal communicative norms such as what people are wearing, where they stand relative to one another, and the dialect they use.

Which of the following would help researchers determine the historical relationships among languages?

searching for similarities within core vocabularies that would indicate that the languages shared a common parent language