SA 21 TEST 3

Language and Communication

- Communicate through words, actions, odors
-

Non-human communication
- Call systems
o Limited vocal sounds or single utterances which are automatic responses to external stimuli

Productivity and Displacement

Productivity
- Combine what you know and form new words
Displacement
- Human beings are able to talk about things not present
- Abstraction

What sets human being apart from other intelligent life forms?
- We can store information
- Complex language
- Capacity to communicate intriciate system of symbols
- Storing knowledge

Linguistic Anthropology
- Structure
o Where sound is produced
- Use
- Cultural transmission

Social context matters

- Formal and informal language

Sociolinguistics
- Descriptive or structural linguistics (structure): Structure of language
o Phonology: phonemes (speech sounds or contrasts)
o Morphology: morphemes (words and meaningful parts)
What changes the meaning
o Lexicon: dictionary (morphemes and meanings)
Compilation of significant words/ parts of the language
o Syntax: arrangement and order
Grammar; proper construction

Language, Thought, and Culture

- Universal Language of Noam Chomsky (1955)
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
o Language produces thought (gender, time)
o Reflects what is important to cultures
o Reflects experience
o Focal vocabulary specialized terms important to groups (sports, occupation, economy); most susceptible
to change (technology, industry, life changing experiences)
- Ethnosemantics (classificatory systems)
- Ethnobotany and ethnomedicine
- Color categories (Berlin and Kay in Ember and Ember)
- Marine biologists and fisherfolk in Pangasinan
Social Context
- formal and informal (written and spoken)
- Level of intimacy or nature of relationship
Social stratification, class and position
Group identity

Socialization
process whereby people learn values, attitudes, motivations, and behavior appropriate by their culture
a life long process
primary socializatoin - individuals have mastered the basic info and skills required of members
adult socialization - adults learn new statuses and roles, resocialization, relearning, or
unlearning
Avenues for socializaton: family, peer groups, school, media, jobs, community, church

Cultural Transmission and enculturation

major portions of societys knowledge ar epassed from one generation to the next

Educational Systems - all societies have ways of teaching the young tasks which are expected of them as
developing adults

generally, simple societies do not distinguish between socialization and education

complex societies, with its more stratified nature, distinguish between informal learning & educational
institutional learning

Functionalist View of Educational systems (see photo gallery)

Functionalist View (Manifest or INtended)

continuation of socialization (cultural transmission): ethnicity and religion
academic skills
innovative thinking

Latent Functions (unintended consequences of the system)

nutrition
childcare (or manifest as in day care in corporations)
postpone job hunting
increasing status of women/gender equality
social mobility or equalizing the playing field (Thomas Friedmans The World is Flat 2005)
Veue for political exercises
Venue for income generation
Census taking
Social network (friends, partners, contacts)

Are needs being met?

US Studies report low arithmetic and reading skills (Tischler)
Prescilla Manalang 70s study showing early drop out rates, consistent with 80s-90s barrio teacher complains
on absences and drop out
Dr. Aurora Roldans life work on student ant teacher competencies
Unemployment rates and outboudn opportunities

Social Conflict Theory View

1. Social Control
a. behavioral conformity (kinder as bootcamp in Henslin)
 a. behavioral conformity (kinder as bootcamp in Henslin)
b. conformity to teacher idesa
c. control over ideas, instruction, values by powerful
2. Screening and allocation
a. tracking (honors classes, courses, schools, life directions or lower or higher track jobs)
b. maintaining stratification and inequality in society
3. Credentialized Society
a. job application
b. mere conformity to expectations

Interactionist Perspective
attitudes, motivations regarding educational institutions including behavior and choices, views are
defined, if not shaped by:
social position or conditions: class, gender, ethnicity
belief systems
peer influence
parental and societal expectations
media reinforcing images
personal passions, interests, and strengths
personalities

Sex - biological; gender - identifier

Sex
- A biological distinctions between male and female (ascribed status)
- Primary sexual characteristics
o Female: XX
o Male: XY
- Secondary sexual characteristics
- Sexual dimorphism

Diseases associated with men and women

heart attack (50:31 die after attack)
Cardiovascular diseases (1:9 aged 45-64 and 1:3 65 up)
visual and hearing impairment (50%>)
autism
Lung cancer

Other physiological dierences - Response to anger: quick response to danger due to testosterone
and adrenalin vs slow response to danger - Muscle tone and strength - Longevity and endurance -
Bone configuration (skull, pelvis) Skull dimorphisms - Mandible shape - Jaw angle - Orbital shape

Problems of a male-female dichotomy

Hermaphrodites (intersex) w both M & Fgenitals
Monosomy - X (turner syndrome)
trisomy - XXY (and other variants)

Gender as an achieved status

- The significance society attaches to biological categories of male and female
- Includes roles, behavioral expectations, stereotypes (cultural)
- Impacts how we think, feel, and behave (identities assumed)
Gender is something you can craft & achieve
Sex is assigned to you at birth
the significance society attaches to the biological categories of male & female
includes roles, behavioral expectations, stereotypes (cultural)
impacts how we think, feel, and behave

Gender role socialization

A lifelong process whereby people learn the values, attitudes, motivations and behavior considered
appropriate to each sex by their culture

Gender as a social construct

Margaret Meads classic study Sex and Temperament, 1935) in New Guinea (masculine Mundugumur,
feminine Arapesh, reversed roles Tchambuli)
- Agta Women and Aka fathers
- Bororo Ritual Dancers
- Gender roles vary with environment, economy, adaptive strategy and political system

Cross-cultural
all cultures posses role differentiation and division of labor (George Murdock 224 preliterate societies in
1937)
male tasks require vigorous activities and travel (ex metal work, building, hunting, clearing land)
Females ad less strenuous, sedentary tasks (ex, grinding, gathering, cooking, weaving, kids)

Sherry Ortner (1974)

uuniversal classification of women as inferior to men
exclusion from perceived powerful roles and activities

Senate and Congress composition (16th 2014)

- 4 Females
Differences in Expectations 10 years hence
Maines and Hardesty 1987
- Men define the future in terms of career achievements (education to attain career)
- Balancing career and family as a none issue because of ready support system
- No need for career adjustments to suit wife and children needs (autonomy)
On the other hand,
- Women felt less autonomy over the future despite having the same skills and education
- Viewed education, career, and family as a balancing act
- More willing to be flexible and give up careers

Gender Stratification
1. Job discrimination
2. Involvement in politics is slow
3. Military assignments unequally
4. Minority women, single mothers further disadvantaged
5. violence against women

Other issues
Feminization of poverty or increasing poverty of female headed households
Sexist remarks and calls
Language relfecting cultural subordination
Human rights of Other genders (homosexual, bi, trans)

4 Theories of Subordination
1. Male strength hypothesis
2. Male aggression hyptoehsis
 2. Male aggression hyptoehsis
3. male- bonding hypothesis
4. Womens child bearing hypothesis

Equality
1. Blurring of private and public domains
a. Women enjoyed better status when they participated in public spheres associated with power and
authority
b. Societies were more egalitarian when men participated in domestic chores
2. Matriarchal, matrilocal, matrifocal societies
3. Equal contribution to diet and family needs
4. Educatinal skills

Kottak Chapt. 15
Linguistic displacement
Ability to talk about things not present
Human conversations are not limited by place
We can discuss the past and future, share our experienced with others, and benefit from theirs

Language
permits the information stored by a human society
Uniquely eective vehicle for learning
Oered a tremendous adaptive ability to Homo
Highly dependent on the use of symbols

Kinesics
Study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions

Certain manners and styles should accompany certain kinds of speech

Body movements communicate social dierences

Phonology
study of speech sounds
Considers which sounds are present and significant in a given language

Morphology
studies the forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes

Morphemes
words and their meaningful parts
E.g. Cats - two morphemes: 1) cat, the animal; and 2) -s, a morpheme indicating plurality

Lexicon
dictionary containing all morphemes and meanings
Influences perception

Syntax
arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences
Syntactic questions include whether nouns usually come before or after verbs, or whether
adjectives normally precede or follow the nouns they modify

Phoneme
Phoneme
sound contrast that makes a dierence, that dierentiates meaning

Minimal pairs
words that resemble each other in all but one sound
The words have totally dierent meanings but they dier in just one sound
E.g.: pit/bit - contrast: p & b

Phonetics
study of speech sounds in general, what people actually say in various languages, like
dierences in vowel pronunciation

Phonemics
studies only rhe significant sound contrasts (phonemes)

Creole Languages
more mature languages with developed grammatical rules and native speakers
Creoles are spoken in several Carribean societies

Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis
dierent languages produce dierent ways of thinking
Grammatical categories of dierent languages lead their speakers to think about things in
particular ways
E.g. Third person singular pronouns of English (he-she, him-her, his-hers) distinguish gender, but
not in other languages
English speakers cannot help but pay more attention to dierences between males & females
English divides time into past, present, and future

Focal vocabulary
specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups

Vocabulary
area of language that changes most readily

Semantics
Refers to a language's meaning system

Meaning
used by speakers of particular languages to organize or categorize their experiences and
perceptions

Ethnosemantics
studies studies classification systems in various languages

Ethnosemantic Domains
sets of related things, perceptions, or concepts named in a language
E.g. Ethnomedicine, ethnobotany

Certain lexical domains and vocabulary items evolve in a determined order

Linguistic Performance
what people actually say

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context
How do dierent speakers use a given language?

People who speak a given language share knowledge of its basic rules. Such common knowledge is
the basis of mutually intelligible communication

Sociolinguists
focus on features that vary systematically with social position and situation
Must do field work to study variation must observe, define, and measure variable use of
language in real-world situations

Linguistic Relativity
principle wherein all dialects are equally eective as systems of communication
communication is languages main job

Honorifics
terms used with people, often being added to their names to honor them
Mr., Mrs., Dr., Dean, Professor, Senator, Reverend, etc.

Kin terms
associated with gradations in rank and familiarity
Dad, Father, daughter, man, dude, girl, bro, son

Extralinguistic Forces
social
political
economic

Pierre Bourdieu
linguistic practices as symbolic capital that properly trained people may convert into economic
and social capital
linguistic insecurity is often felt by lower-class & minority speakers as a result of this symbolic
domination

Black English Vernacular

relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the USA today
also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, inteimate speech of many adults
Vernacular means ordinary, casual speach
does not imply that all, or even most, African Americans speak BEV
a complex linguistic system with its own rules, which linguists have described
its phonology and syntax are similar to those of southern dialects

Copula Deletion
absence of SE forms the copula -> the verb to be

Historical Linguistics
deals with longer-term change
can construct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daughter languages

Daughter languages
languages that descend from the same parent language and that have been changing separately
for hundreds or even thousands of years
evolving speech in the ancestral homeland should be considered a daughter language
 evolving speech in the ancestral homeland should be considered a daughter language

subgroups
languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related

diglossia
existence of high (formal) and low (informal, familial) dialects of a single language
e.g. German

protolanguage
language ancestral to several daughter languages

Tischler Chapt 13
cultural transmissions
major portions of societys knowledge are passed from one generation to the next

tracking
stratification of students by ability, social class, and other various categories

hidden curriculum
social attitudes and values taught in school that prepare children to accept the requirements of
adult life and to fit into the social, political, and economic statues the society provides

de jure segregation
laws prohibiting one racial group from attending school with another

de facto segregation
segregation resulting from residential patterns

white flight
continuing exodus of white Americans by the hundreds of thousands from the cities to the
suburbs
prompted partly by the migration of African Americans from the South to the inner cities of the
North and Midwest

gifted
the word may evoke feelings that range from admiration to resentment and hostility
people have displayed a marked ambivalence toward the gifted
most common measure of giftedness is performance on a standardized test

Kottak Chapt 20
domestic-public dichotomy
contrast between womens role in home and mens role in public life, with a corresponding social
devaluation of womens work and worth

extrodomestic
outside the home
within or pertaining to the public domain

gender roles
tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex

gender stereotypes
gender stereotypes
oversimplified but strongly held ideas about the characteristics of males and females

gender status
more equal when the domestic and public spheres arent sharply separated

gender stratification
unequal distribution of rewards (social valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom)
between men and women, reflecting their dierent positions in a social hierarchy

matrifocal
mother-centered
often refers to a household with no resident husband-father

patriarchy
political system ruled by men in which women have inferior social and political status, including
basic human rights

patrilineal-patrilocal complex
interrelated constellation of patrilineality, patrilocality, war-fare, and male supremacy

sexual dimorphism
marked dierences in male and female biology besides the contrasts in breasts and genitals

sexual orientation
persons habitual sexual attraction to, and activities with, persons of the opposite sex,
heterosexuality; the same sex, homosexuality; or both sexes, bisexuality