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Anthropology
Q:
A key feature of language that helps explain anthropologists continued interest in studying it is that it
A. enables us to compare human and nonhuman primate linguistic grammars.
B. tells us a lot about the present, although nothing about the past.
C. is always changing.
D. helps them distinguish between the more and less evolved human races.
E. rarely changes, so it provides a good window into linguistic uses of the past.
Q:
Problems arise with contemporary means of communication, such as texting and online messaging, because much of what we communicate is a nonverbal reflection of emotional states.
Q:
Linguistic stratification can occur between dialects when one is considered a prestige dialect, as is the case with High German and Low German, or with Standard English (SE) and Black English Vernacular (BEV).
Q:
Compare and contrast the evolution of language and biological evolution. What role may mutations play in the origins of human language, if any?
Q:
Black English Vernacular (BEV) is an incomplete linguistic system that is able only to express thoughts and ideas related to life in inner-city communities.
Q:
The origins of BEV are found mostly in West Africa, not in the dialects of the southern part of the United States.
Q:
Creole languages are commonly found in regions where different linguistic groups come into contact with one another.
Q:
Historical linguists use linguistic similarities and differences in the world today to study long-term changes in language.
Q:
The worlds linguistic diversity has been cut in half, as measured by the number of distinct languages extant, in the past 500 years, and half of the remaining languages are predicted to disappear during this century.
Q:
Sociolinguists study linguistic performance by categorizing speakers as inadequate, competent, or highly proficient.
Q:
Diglossia refers to linguistic groups, like those in Papua New Guinea and Australia, that distinguish between only two colors: black and white or dark and light.
Q:
All languages and dialects are equally effective as systems of communication.
Q:
Bourdieu argues that languages with the highest symbolic capital are those that are better systems of communication.
Q:
In all languages, the same honorifics have the same meaning, regardless of context.
Q:
Sociolinguistics has demonstrated that men lack the linguistic capacity to distinguish between slight changes in color.
Q:
Studies investigating differences in the way men and women talk are examples of sociolinguistics.
Q:
Recent genetic research suggests that a speech-friendly mutation took hold in humans around 150,000 years ago, thus conferring selective advantages (linguistic and cultural abilities) that allowed those who had it to spread it, at the expense of those who did not.
Q:
Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
Q:
All human nonverbal communication is instinctive, not influenced by cultural factors.
Q:
Phonology is the study of speech sounds.
Q:
Syntax refers to the rules that dictate the order of words in a language.
Q:
Sapir and Whorf argued that all humans share a single set of universal grammatical categories.
Q:
Focal vocabularies are found only in non-Western societies like the Eskimo and the Nuer.
Q:
In this chapter, an alternative to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that cultural changes lead to changes in language.
Q:
Ethnosemantics studies how different members of different linguistic groups organize, categorize, and classify their experiences and perceptions.
Q:
This chapters Appreciating Anthropology section discusses research on the ancient syntax of a proto-human language, thought to be ancestral to all contemporary languages. This research suggests that
A. the proto-language sounded similar to modern-day English.
B. subject-verb-object ordering is very rare in languages spoken today.
C. word ordering within a language is uniform across the world.
D. word ordering has remained constant over time, not changing when languages branch off from their mother tongues.
E. the proto-language sounded similar to the speech of Yoda in Star Wars.
Q:
Animal call systems exhibit linguistic productivity.
Q:
Linguistic productivity refers to the fixed linguistic structures that prevent the creation of new expressions.
Q:
Sapir and Whorf argued that the grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways. However, studies on the differences between female and male Americans in regard to the color terms they use suggest that
A. changes in the U.S. economy, society, and culture have had no impact on the use of color terms, or on any other terms for that matter.
B. contrary to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it might be more reasonable to say that changes in culture produce changes in language and thought rather than the reverse.
C. in support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, different languages produce different ways of thinking.
D. women and men are equally sensitive to the marketing tactics of the cosmetic industry.
E. women spend more money on status goods than do men.
Q:
________ refers to the specialized set of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups.
A. Syntactical vocabulary
B. Spatial vocabulary
C. Focal vocabulary
D. Vernacular vocabulary
E. Temporal vocabulary
Q:
A sociolinguist studies
A. the interaction of history and sociology.
B. cross-cultural comparisons of phonemic distinctions.
C. the universal grammar of language.
D. linguistic competence.
E. speech in its social context.
Q:
Which of the following statements about sociolinguists is NOT true?
A. They are concerned more with performance than with competence.
B. They look at society and at language.
C. They are concerned with linguistic change.
D. They focus on surface structure.
E. They are more interested in the rules that govern language than the actual use of language in everyday life.
Q:
What is the term for the variations in speech due to different contexts or situations?
A. linguistic confusion
B. situational syntax
C. contextual phonetics
D. Chomskian verbosity
E. style shifting
Q:
Cultural, including linguistic, diversity is alive, well, and thriving in many countries. Local entrepreneurs and international companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft that capitalize on that diversity are positioned to succeed. That success depends, however, in large part on
A. their ability to creatively impose their product on others.
B. their capacity to take a biocultural approach to marketing.
C. external market forces that have little to do with peoples cultural, including linguistic, preferences.
D. their ability to hire workers from the markets they hope to enter and teach them the values of their corporate culture.
E. their capacity to follow one of the main lessons of applied anthropology, that external inputs fit best when tailored properly to local settings.
Q:
What term refers to the existence of high and low dialects within a single language?
A. displacement
B. diglossia
C. semantics
D. kinesics
E. lexicon
Q:
What terms are used to convey or imply a status difference between the speaker and the person being referred to or addressed?
A. formal addresses, but sociolinguists rarely pay attention to them, because their use in a social situation is always a result of linguistic exploitation
B. honorifics
C. style shifts
D. diglossia
E. linguistic relativity
Q:
What is an example of what Bourdieu calls symbolic domination in the context of language use?
A. in an egalitarian society, the promotion of linguistic diversity
B. pride in ones linguistic heritage, regardless of what the majority thinks
C. the fact that in a stratified society, even people who do not speak the prestige dialect tend to accept it as standard or superior
D. focal vocabulary contrasts among groups
E. Chomskys insistence that the universal grammar defines all culture
Q:
When does copula deletion (absence of the verb to be) occur in BEV?
A. where SE has contractions
B. randomly
C. in the past tense
D. in the future tense
E. in SE, not BEV
Q:
What term refers to languages that have descended from the same ancestral language?
A. F2 languages
B. sibling languages
C. daughter languages
D. brother languages
E. protolanguages
Q:
What is pidgin?
A. A partial language that results from primitive tribes attempts to learn the language of a modern industrialized state.
B. A mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact, usually in situations of trade or colonial domination.
C. A rhythmic sublanguage present in any human language as the result of a universally shared mutation.
D. A set of languages believed to be most like the original human language, spoken by a small population of Indian Ocean islanders.
E. Metalanguage developed by computer programmers that has yielded valuable insights into the workings of the human brain.
Q:
One aspect of linguistic history is language loss. When a language disappears,
A. less strain is put on the educational system, because it has less language diversity to deal with.
B. this is confirmation to historical linguists that language is also a victim of evolutionary forces.
C. so does pride in ones heritage.
D. cultural diversity is reduced as well.
E. humanity is that much closer to global integration.
Q:
Which of the following was studied by Sapir and Whorf?
A. the interaction of thought on surface structure
B. the influence of language on thought
C. the influence of deep structure on surface structure
D. the influence of deep structure on semantic domains
E. the influence of culture on language
Q:
Discuss ethical dilemmas and possible solutions with respect to the kinds of applied anthropology discussed in this chapter.
Q:
HIV/AIDS is a global pandemic. How does culture play a role in HIV transmission? How might applied anthropology help in finding a solution to this problem?
Q:
What is the term for the ability to create new expressions by combining other expressions?
A. displacement
B. diglossia
C. productivity
D. morphemic utility
E. phonemic utility
Q:
Recent research on the origins of language suggests that a key mutation might have something to do with it. Comparing chimp and human genomes, it appears that
A. chimps lack the tongue-rolling gene that all humans have, which might explain why they struggle to achieve clear speech.
B. chimps share with humans all the genetic propensities for language but lack the language-activation mutation.
C. a speech-friendly mutation occurred among Neandertals in Europe and spread to other human populations through gene flow.
D. the speech-friendly form of FOXP2 took hold in humans some 150,000 years ago, thus conferring selective advantages (linguistic and cultural abilities) that allowed those who had it to spread it, at the expense of those who did not.
E. the speech mutation occurred even before the hominin line split from the rest of the hominids.
Q:
Language and communication involve much more than just verbal speech. The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions is known as
A. linguistic physiology.
B. biosemantics.
C. kinesics.
D. protolinguistics.
E. diglossia.
Q:
Linguistic anthropologists also are interested in investigating the structure of language and how it varies across time and space. What is the study of the forms in which sounds combine to form words?
A. phonology
B. syntax
C. morphology
D. lexicon
E. grammar
Q:
The lexicon of a language is
A. a dictionary containing all of its morphemes and their meanings.
B. its degree of complexity.
C. the set of rules that govern the written but not spoken language.
D. its symbolic and poetic value.
E. the range of speech sounds.
Q:
What term refers to the arrangement and order of words into sentences?
A. syntax
B. lexicon
C. grammar
D. phonology
E. morphology
Q:
What are phonemes?
A. the rules by which deep structure is translated into surface structure
B. regional differences in dialect
C. syntactical structures that distinguish passive constructions from active ones
D. the minimal sound contrasts that distinguish meaning in a language
E. electromagnetic signals that carry messages between speakers in a telephone conversation
Q:
What is the study of the sounds used in speech?
A. phones
B. phonemes
C. phonology
D. phonetics
E. phonemics
Q:
Just as in other areas of anthropology, the study of language involves investigating what is or isnt shared across human populations and why these differences or similarities exist. The linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language, so that all languages have a common structural basis. He calls this set of rules
A. the evolutionary linguistic imprint.
B. linguistic structuralism.
C. generalities.
D. a global mental map.
E. the universal grammar.
Q:
What, if anything, is the difference between an anthropologist currently consulting on a development project in Indonesia and another one conducting research in support of the British colonial governments efforts to subdue African natives in the 1930s?
Q:
There is considerable debate today over whether or not governments should require schools to provide bilingual education for students, and if so, to what extent this should be carried out. Pretend that you are an anthropologist who has been asked to provide guidance on this issue to a school board in a bilingual community. What can you suggest about the nature of ethnicity, language, and enculturation that will help educators address their challenges?
Q:
Discuss the major advantages and disadvantages of scientific and traditional medicine, being careful to distinguish between scientific medicine and Western medicine.
Q:
How might a premedical student apply some of the knowledge learned through anthropology as a physician? What is the value of studying the curing and belief systems of patients ethnic groups?
Q:
Biomedicine, which aims to link an illness to scientifically-demonstrated agents that bear no personal malice toward their victims, is an example of naturalistic medicine.
Q:
Health care systems refers to the nationalized health care services that exist only in core industrial nations.
Q:
Non-Western medicine does not maintain a sharp distinction between biological and psychological illnesses.
Q:
Non-Western medicine treats illnesses symptomatically, seeking an immediate cure.
Q:
Scientific medicine is not the same thing as Western medicine. Despite advances in technology, genomics, molecular biology, pathology, surgery, diagnostics, and applications, many Western medical procedures have little justification in logic or fact.
Q:
A bachelors degree in anthropology is of little value in the corporate world.
Q:
Define applied anthropology. What distinguishes the old from the new applied anthropology? Can you think of any examples in current events that question whether or not new applied anthropology has completely moved on from the dangers of the old?
Q:
Discuss the relevance of the ethnographic method for modern society, contemporary problems, and applied anthropology.
Q:
What is the relationship between theory and practice in anthropology? Do you agree that applied anthropology should be recognized as a separate subsection of anthropology?
Q:
Identify government, international, and private organizations that concern themselves with socioeconomic change abroad and hire anthropologists to help meet their goals. Review their mission statements. Do they make reference to the dangers of underdifferentiation or overinnovation?
Q:
When nations become more tied to the world economy, indigenous forms of social organization inevitably break down into nuclear family organization, impersonality, and alienation.
Q:
Sociolinguists and cultural anthropologists studying Puerto Rican communities in the Midwestern United States found that Puerto Rican parents valued education more than non-Hispanics.
Q:
In his comparison of rural versus urban communities, Robert Redfield found that cultural innovations spread from urban areas to rural ones.
Q:
The Samoan community living in Los Angeles has successfully used the matai system to deal with modern urban problems.
Q:
Strictly speaking, medical anthropology is an applied field within anthropology.
Q:
An illness is a scientifically identified health threat caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite, or other pathogen.
Q:
Although its roots extend further back in time, the real boom for applied anthropology in the United States began in the 1970s.
Q:
Academic and applied anthropology have a symbiotic relationship, as theory aids practice and application fuels theory.
Q:
Developmental anthropology is the branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimensions of, moral development.
Q:
A commonly stated goal of recent development policy is to promote equity; that is, to reduce poverty and promote a more even distribution of wealth.
Q:
A comparative study of 68 rural development projects from all around the world found culturally compatible economic development projects to be twice as successful financially as incompatible ones.
Q:
It is safe to assume that there is less cultural diversity among the poorest, less developed countries in the world.
Q:
Fortunately for applied anthropologists eager to do effective international work, all governments are genuinely and realistically committed to improving the lives of their citizens.