Updated on MONDAY, MARCH 7th, 2005.
STUDY GUIDE FOR LING 275 FINAL EXAM 2005
DATE: Thursday, March 17th, 2005
TIME: 12:30on
FORMAT: T/F, Matching, short answer, a choice of one one-paragraph-answer question
CONTENT: Material covered in class, on videos, as described in class, and in
the Study Guide below.
From Weeks 1-5.
1. Using at least 4 terms from the following Word Bank, describe
your final project and the conclusion(s) you reached about the relationship
between language and culture in 50 words or less.
WORD BANK: cultural model, speech community, speech network,
ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, worldview, ethnocentrism, stereotypes
2. Review Salzmann Chapter 1.: Introducing Linguistic Anthropology
(particularly pgs. 12-16) for the purpose of answering the following questions.
a. What are two common misconceptions (myths) about language?
b. What was Dell Hymes’ particular take on the equality of languages?
From Week 8.
3. Approximately how many languages are spoken in the world today?
4. Correctly define the following terms: Pidgin, Creole, Gullah.
5. Name several (three or four) words and/or phrases used in American English
today that can be traced to Plantation Creole and West African speech.
6. Distinguish between “dialect” and “style” and be
able to give some examples of each from your viewing of the video “Black
On Black”and or from the Salzmann Text.
7. What is Bickerson’s Bioprogram Hypothesis? Be able to explain it’s
significance and how he arrived at his conclusion.
8. What is AAVE (or AAE) and is it a dialect, a creole, a pidgin, or a distinct
language? Explan.
9. Who are “men-of-words”? (Salzmann Chapter 8.)
From Week 9.
10. What is the difference between diachronic and synchronic linguistics?
11. What are the two kinds of language change?
12. What is a protolanguage? What assumptions do linguists now have about the
origin of human language?
13. What was Bloomfield’s (and later Siebert’s) contribution to
synchronic linguistics?
14. How is archeology and human evolution related to protolanguage analysis?
15. What is the polygenesis theory, the monogenesis theory, and the protolanguage
theory?
16. What is glottochronology? What are some core vocabulary word types that
tend to be replaced at a constant rate? (Salzmann pg. 153-154.)
From Week 10.
17. What is a contemporary definition of folklore?
18 . How did the collection of traditional narratives begin in the United States?
19 . Be able to describe approaches to classify traditional narratives such
as the structural analysis including motif and story type.
20 . Who was Claude Lévi Strauss and what was his particular theory of
how structures of the unconscious mind could be accessed through traditional
narratives?
21 . What is the four most commonly spoken language on the planet?
22 . What are the most studied foreign languages in the US?
23 . From Salzmann Chapter 13
a. Why is an understanding of communicative styles important?
b. What is language planning?
c. What is language maintenance and reinforcement?
24 . What is linguistic profiling?
25 . What is the difference between making sociological inferences based on
the sound of a person’s voice, and linguistic profiling?
From Word Play by Peter Farb
1. Read Section V – Chapters 15 and 16 and be prepared to answer the following questions in multiple choice and or short answer form.
Chapter 15: Language In Flux
a. What does Farb mean by language in flux?
b. Have linguists been able to agree on the exact causes of language change?
c. The origin of which language is among the most easily studied and why?
d. Be able to name and describe two influences on language change.
Chapter 16: Repairing Babel
e. What does Farb mean by repairing Babel?
f. What is Esperonto and what has its role been in repairing Babel?
g. What is a more realistic approach for repairing Babel?
h. What does Farb think about the possibility that global intelligibility will
bring about peach and understanding in our splintered world?