Deck 4: Language and Communication

Question 1

What is the term for the modern scientific study of all aspects of language?

A) glottochronology
B) phonology
C) linguistics
D) grammar

Answer 1

linguistics

Question 2

What is the term for the study of abstract rules that guide the sound patterns of a language?

A) phonetics
B) phonology
C) syntax
D) morphology

Answer 2

phonology

Question 3

How many free morphemes are there in the word "bedrooms"?

A) none
B) one
C) two
D) three

Answer 3

two

Question 4

Which of the following can be said of all symbols?

A) Symbols are the main form of animal communication.
B) Symbols cannot be learned.
C) Symbols are strictly responses to aspects of the immediate environment.
D) Symbols are any sound or gesture to which cultural tradition has assigned meaning.

Question 5

You are a non-English-speaking linguist using a minimal-pair test to study the sound system of English.You pronounce two short words that are exactly the same except for one sound: "bat" and "vat." Then you ask your informants if the difference in sound has any effect on meaning.They say,"Of course-wouldn't you prefer to have your dinner cooked in a vat instead of a bat?" What are these two sounds examples of?

A) phonemes
B) vocal qualifiers
C) vocal segregates
D) morphemes

Question 6

What is the term for the smallest classes of sounds that make for differences in meaning?

A) allophones
B) morphemes
C) allomorphs
D) phonemes

Question 7

Which of the following can be said of all languages?

A) They are symbolic systems of communication.
B) They are based on structured sets of signals.
C) They vary in their richness of expression.
D) They share much of the same vocabulary.

Question 8

What is the primary focus of linguistic anthropology?

A) the analysis of the sound systems of languages
B) the collection of vocabularies from all languages for comparative purposes
C) how humans use language to transmit culture and develop social relationships
D) the preserving of all languages from extinction

Question 9

Consider the English word "unhappy." What is the prefix "un-" an example of?

A) an allophone
B) a vocal qualifier
C) a free morpheme
D) a bound morpheme

Question 10

What do all languages have in common?

A) They are based on inherited symbols and signals.
B) They assemble sounds in meaningful ways.
C) They originated in Europe during Paleolithic times.
D) They evolved from a common language in the Middle East.

Question 11

To determine the rules of syntax,a linguist assembles strings of morphemes and looks for categories within which certain morphemes will fit.What is this method called?

A) frame substitution
B) glottochronology
C) phonetics
D) phonology

Question 12

Which of the following do we depend on for the transmission of culture?

A) signals
B) imitation
C) vocalization
D) language

Question 13

What is the term for a system of communicating using sounds or gestures organized by rules?

A) signal
B) form class
C) language
D) vocalization

Question 14

How many bound morphemes are there in the word "unhurriedly"?

A) none
B) one
C) two
D) three

Question 15

What is the term for the systemic study of the production,transmission,and reception of speech sounds?

A) linguistics
B) morphology
C) syntax
D) phonetics

Question 16

Approximately how many different languages are used in the world today?

A) 100,000
B) 6,000
C) 1,000
D) 100

Question 17

Linguists elicit groups or combinations of sounds that are used to convey information.What is the term for these meaningful units?

A) phonemes
B) vocal frames
C) morphemes
D) glottochrones

Question 18

Approximately how many sounds are generally used in spoken language?

A) 10
B) 25
C) 50
D) 100

Question 19

What does the term "syntax" refer to?

A) the rules for combining sounds into words
B) the rules for combining bound and free morphemes
C) the rules for combining morphemes into phrases and sentences
D) the rules for substituting phonemes for morphemes

Question 20

How many morphemes are found in the word "unkindness"?

A) one
B) two
C) three
D) six

Question 21

Two people say to you,"What a great idea." They are saying the same words,yet you can tell that one person is being enthusiastic and the other disinterested.What is this an example of?

A) vocal qualifiers
B) vocal characteristics
C) voice segregates
D) voice qualities

Question 22

Paralanguage includes not only the way people say things but also a variety of extralinguistic noises.What is the term for these extralinguistic noises?

A) phonemes
B) substitution frames
C) vocalizations
D) kinesics

Question 23

Which term would best characterize a study of how Canadians avoid invading the personal space of others?

A) proxemics
B) paralinguistics
C) kinesics
D) syntactics

Question 24

Which term refers to body movements that are learned and thus vary cross-culturally?

A) gestural affirmations
B) expressive signatures
C) bound gesturals
D) conventional gestures

Question 25

When a descriptive linguist is starting research on a language,what does he or she first attempt to identify?

A) the form classes
B) the speaker's life history and social status within the community
C) the nouns and verbs in the language
D) smaller,easily identifiable categories such as pronouns and prepositions

Question 26

Human language is always embedded in the social identity,emotional state,and intentions of the speaker.What is this form of nonverbal communication referred to as?

A) syntax-frame system
B) background-position system
C) gesture-call system
D) lingua franca

Question 27

Which of the following is an example of "vocal segregates"?

A) reptile communications
B) word sequences
C) sobs,screams,and moans
D) "oh oh" expressions

Question 28

What is a complete dictionary of all the words in a language called?

A) a compendium
B) an index
C) a content list
D) a lexicon

Question 29

How many facial expressions are humans capable of using?

A) 250,000
B) 25,000
C) 2,500
D) 250

Question 30

What is kinesics best defined as?

A) the study of gendered communication
B) the description and analysis of body language
C) the objective investigation of sexual communication
D) the study of animal-human communication

Question 31

What is yawning audibly while listening to a lengthy speech an example of?

A) glottis control
B) vocal characterizer
C) resonance
D) proxemics

Question 32

In North America,in what way does the posture of men's legs tend to differ from that of women?

A) It is more formal than women's.
B) It is more apart than women's.
C) It is more stiff than women's.
D) It is more right angular than women's.

Question 33

Which of the following is notated and analyzed by means of "kinesics"?

A) the effects of aging
B) child social development
C) verbal communication
D) body language

Question 34

In English,what proportion of emotional information is NOT transmitted by spoken words alone?

A) 25 percent
B) 50 percent
C) 70 percent
D) 90 percent

Question 35

What does kinesics research indicate about language and culture?

A) Extralinguistic sounds that accompany speech have the same meaning in all languages.
B) Gender signals communicated through posture are biologically based rather than learned.
C) The body language used when people are greeting each other is similar all over the world.
D) All cultures have the same gestures for "yes" and "no."

Question 36

What are the parts of speech or categories of words that work the same way in any sentence called?

A) morphemes
B) frame classes
C) nominatives
D) lexicons

Question 37

What is the term for the entire formal structure of a language,consisting of all observations about its meaningful units of sounds and the rules or principles for making phrases and sentences?

A) grammar
B) syntax
C) morphology
D) phonology

Question 38

Which of the following is related to body posture as speech is to paralanguage?

A) kinesics
B) ethnolinguistics
C) displacement
D) phonetics

Question 39

What does "frame substitution" enable the linguist to establish for a given language?

A) its morphology
B) its form classes
C) its syntax
D) its core vocabulary

Question 40

In a courtroom,which term would best characterize a study of how a witness gives testimony,as opposed to what the witness actually says while testifying?

A) proxemics
B) paralanguage
C) faming
D) abstractions

Question 41

What does descriptive linguistics do?

A) It explains how languages evolve.
B) It examines components of languages as separate systems.
C) It reconstructs a language's historical development.
D) It investigates relationships between languages and biology.

Question 42

What does core vocabulary include?

A) names of places
B) names of body parts
C) names of plant species
D) names of gods

Question 43

Which statement about linguistic divergence is correct?

A) Borrowing by one language from another is a force for linguistic change.
B) If languages were isolated from each other,there would be more linguistic change.
C) New vocabulary emerges in a language as a result of linguistic random mutation.
D) Specialized vocabularies associated with specific groups may further enhance change.

Question 44

You are a South Asian linguist studying modern Hindi verb forms.What is your field of linguistics called?

A) kinetive linguistics
B) phonetic linguistics
C) descriptive linguistics
D) hypothetic linguistics

Question 45

In Canada,French-English bilingualism is a resource,but it is also a source of conflict.Why?

A) Francophones are more bilingual than anglophones.
B) People have unequal access to it.
C) People don't see the humour in it.
D) Bilingual anglophones see the advantage of their majority position being eroded by bilingual francophones.

Question 46

By comparing the core vocabularies of two languages using glottochronology,what is it thought possible to determine?

A) whether the two groups of speakers perceive reality in the same way
B) whether the languages share the same allophones
C) how long ago the languages separated from each other
D) how closely the languages reflect similar technologies

Question 47

Which of the following is one of the provisions of Quebec's French Language Charter,Bill 101?

A) All people living in Quebec must speak French.
B) No English may be taught in public schools.
C) Immigrant children in Quebec must be schooled in French.
D) All public signs must be in French.

Question 48

Which of the following statements about the world's languages is correct?

A) Aboriginal languages are not seriously threatened.
B) The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects Aboriginal languages by giving them official status.
C) At the beginning of the 15th century,about 15,000 languages were spoken worldwide.
D) Only 2,000 of the world's current languages are presently safe from extinction.

Question 49

Admiration for a new and clever phrase;the development of a specialized vocabulary to distinguish a professional group;the efforts of the members of the upper class to distinguish themselves from the lower classes by maintaining a distinct mode of pronunciation.What may all of these contribute to?

A) linguistic divergence
B) vocal segregation
C) frame substitution
D) core vocabulary

Question 50

Which branch of linguistics is concerned with the study of relationships between earlier and later forms of a language,the development (from older languages)of modern languages,and relationships among older languages?

A) chronological linguistics
B) descriptive linguistics
C) sociological linguistics
D) historical linguistics

Question 51

Which of the following is a primary cause of the disappearance of many of the world's languages?

A) enculturation
B) isolation
C) literacy
D) colonialism

Question 52

The French-English debate may be losing relevance for contemporary Canadians.Why?

A) Nearly all Canadians are fluent in both languages.
B) Quebec is probably going to separate from Canada.
C) Many Canadians have ties to other important linguistic identities.
D) French is not being used in other countries of the world.

Question 53

What do all the members of a language family have in common?

A) They have the same core vocabulary.
B) They are subordinate to a dominant language.
C) They are descended from a single ancestral language.
D) They use the same number of sounds.

Question 54

In Montreal,how do businesses successfully accommodate to bilingualism?

A) by strictly adhering to Bill 101,Quebec's French Language Charter
B) by carefully determining the language politics of each new customer by listening for phonological and grammatical cues
C) by acknowledging that it is virtually impossible to know the language background of each customer
D) by speaking only English in all commercial situations,regardless of the language used by the customer

Question 55

The Quebec government periodically attempts to purge the French language of English influences such as le hamburger.What is this an example of?

A) linguistic aggression
B) linguistic isolationism
C) linguistic nationalism
D) ethnolinguistics

Question 56

Which of the following is NOT an example of linguistic nationalism?

A) You are an immigrant to Canada from Somalia,and you want your children to use only English so they will fit in more easily with the surrounding Canadian society.
B) A national committee in France declares that certain widely used terms will no longer be allowed to appear in public print because they are not French.
C) You live in Scotland and are so alarmed by the rapid decline in the number of people speaking Gaelic that you start a school in which all subjects are taught in Gaelic.
D) An African country once colonized by the British passes a law requiring everyone to speak the native tongue;English is banned because of its association with colonialism.

Question 57

What is the term for the development of different languages from a single ancestral language?

A) linguistic nationalism
B) linguistic isolation
C) language convergence
D) linguistic divergence

Question 58

How did the English language originate?

A) It came from the Indo-European language family.
B) It is a daughter language of the Saxon language subgroup.
C) It is a variant of Irish Gaelic.
D) It developed in isolation from the continent.

Question 59

Which of the following statements about endangered languages is correct?

A) Languages are safe from extinction as long as children still learn and speak them at home and in school.
B) English may soon be the only language spoken.
C) Most international languages were exterminated by the British.
D) As more languages go extinct,people will progress and have less difficulty communicating.

Question 60

Which statement about Instant Messaging (IM)language is true?

A) IM is used and understood exclusively by smart phone users.
B) IM contains only 32 acronyms and emoticons.
C) Teenagers who use IM extensively are generally unable to communicate adequately with standard English in written form.
D) IM is composed of short,concise sentences or fragments of sentences,and acronyms,abbreviations,and emoticons.

Question 61

Which statement about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would be considered correct?

A) Whorf purchased his early knowledge of the Hopi.
B) It draws relationships between language and the rest of culture.
C) Thinking generally shapes how language develops.
D) Language determines reality.

Question 62

Despite the limited success of Asen Balikci's films on the Netsilik,what is the most lasting contribution of his visual anthropology?

A) He was able to establish a school for visual anthropology at McGill.
B) In an academic setting,his ethnographic films are a valuable teaching tool that can show in one scene what could never be described in a thousand words.
C) They were used in negotiations with the Canadian government to create Nunavut.
D) They allowed Balikci to complete his Ph.D.as Canada's fist visual anthropologist.

Question 63

Which term is usually used to refer to varying forms of a single language that reflect particular regions or social classes and that are similar enough to be mutually intelligible?

A) dialect
B) subgroup
C) family
D) linguistic nationalism

Question 64

The films on the Netsilik Inuit made by Asen Balikci were originally designed to eliminate the ethnocentrism prevalent in U.S.history and social sciences courses through a comparative study of world cultures.Why did the Americans eventually stop using these films?

A) Funding was withdrawn because Alaska Inuit were not featured.
B) Religious politicians thought they glorified paganism.
C) They preferred dramatizations and romanticized views of happy-go-lucky,primitive sport hunters to the reality depicted in the films.
D) They felt that the films faked too much of the Inuit's lifestyle.

Question 65

What do attempts to teach ASL to chimpanzees,gorillas,and orangutans suggest?

A) Chimpanzees are the most intelligent of all the great apes.
B) Only gorillas have comprehension skills.
C) Acquisition of language occurs in the same order for both apes and humans.
D) Great apes can develop language skills at least to the level of a nine-year-old human.

Question 66

Many endangered languages and associated oral traditions are unwritten and undocumented.As a result,what will most likely be the outcome?

A) Some trace of them will always exist no matter what.
B) There will be only recorded versions once the language becomes extinct.
C) There will be only written versions once the language becomes extinct.
D) There will be no trace of the oral tradition once the language becomes extinct.

Question 67

What did Asen Balikci's Netsilik Inuit film series show?

A) It showed modernized Netsilik hunting techniques.
B) It showed simple people living happy lives.
C) It showed the ongoing creativity and adaptability of Inuit life.
D) It showed a "whitewashed" picture to mask the suffering of the Netsilik.

Question 68

Which of the goals held by anthropologists and linguists is the World Oral Literature Project most closely associated with?

A) preserving and developing the diversity of languages around the world
B) understanding the relationship between language and thought
C) tracing the historical development of the world's languages.
D) understanding the structural aspects of oral literature

Question 69

How does Black English stand in relation to Standard English?

A) It is a separate language from Standard English.
B) It is a substandard version of Standard English.
C) It is an original structured language.
D) It is a dialect of Standard English.

Question 70

The English language reflects a long-standing ideology of male dominance in Western societies.How is this problem viewed in the modern world?

A) Using language that demeans women or men trivializes their existence,perpetuates stereotypes,and reinforces gender bias in our society.
B) Using language that demeans women or men trivializes their existence by excluding women from political discourse.
C) It is not really a serious problem these days as males are no longer dominant.
D) It is only a problem to the extent that women still think it is a problem.

Question 71

Which of the following is another term for "Black English"?

A) African-American Vernacular English
B) Afro-chat
C) Afronics
D) Pidgin English

Question 72

A Scottish butler in an English mansion says to the lady of the house,"You may wish to stay inside today,Madam;it's quite cold outside." But when he goes back to his own cottage,he is likely to say to his wife in broad Scots,"Shut the door and get inside,Maggie;you'll freeze your buns off." In linguistics,what is this an example of?

A) code switching
B) class consciousness
C) glottochronology
D) phonological analysis

Question 73

Which statement about pidgin languages is true?

A) They are not a response to trade.
B) They combine the syntax and dialects of several languages.
C) They are usually linked to colonial situations.
D) They are no longer spoken,only written.

Question 74

Which term refers to the study of the structure and use of language as it relates to its social setting?

A) descriptive linguistics
B) contextual linguistics
C) code switching
D) sociolinguistics

Question 75

An ambitious man may be described as "forceful," but an ambitious woman might be described in a more negative manner.Which of the following terms might be used to describe an ambitious woman?

A) violent
B) tough
C) arrogant
D) pushy

Question 76

What is the main focus of ethnolinguistics?

A) differences among the world's languages
B) the relationship between language and culture
C) the development of professional and scientific language
D) sound systems in ethnically related languages

Question 77

What is the main goal of the World Oral Literature Project?

A) to create a "talking library" out of print book examples from all cultures
B) to support local communities and committed fieldworkers engaged in the collection and preservation of all forms of oral literature by providing funding for original research
C) to support local communities and committed fieldworkers engaged in the collection and preservation of all past oral literature by providing funding for original research
D) to create a "talking library" out of traditional oral culture examples from all cultures

Question 78

Like humans,the great apes display evidence of displacement when using ASL.What is this phenomenon best described as?

A) communicating about things and events removed in time and space
B) forgetting what has been communicated
C) applying labels to objects so as to form categories
D) using such terms as sorry and please

Question 79

Which of the following best defines the term "oral literature"?

A) any form of print literature that is delivered orally
B) any form of folktale which is transmitted orally or delivered by word of mouth
C) any form of verbal art which is transmitted orally or delivered by word of mouth
D) any form of literature that is captured on tape

Question 80

How will the public access the products created by the World Oral Literature Project?

A) through a digital repository for contemporary and heritage recordings,and a website to host open access recordings
B) through the Cambridge University library
C) through the British National Archives
D) through attending public readings of the content