Test Bank For Language Culture And Communication 7th Edition by Bonvillain

Chapter 3—Language and Cultural Meaning

Chapter Objectives

After reading this chapter, students should be able to:

1. Define the concept of a cultural model and explain how cultural models are overtly and covertly expressed through language.
2. Examine the foundations of linguistic anthropology
3. Evaluate both lexical and cultural categories in the study of linguistics.
4. Show how cultural presuppositions as defined in linguistics relate to cultural models as expressed through language.
5. Evaluate the concepts of semantic extension and transfer.
6. Discuss kinship metaphors in English, Navajo, and Kannada.
7. Discuss body metaphors in English and Zapotec.

Chapter Overview

This chapter discusses how language helps to create and reify cultural models of the physical world and social interaction. It begins by discussing the concept of a cultural model and the overt and covert ways cultural models are expressed in language. The works of Sapir and Whorf are described, as well as Volosinov’s simultaneous hypothesis concerning linguistic relativity. Following this, the author describes studies of linguistic relativity, focusing on Lucy’s (1996) study of English and Yucatec conceptualizations of plurals and numerals and Boroditsky’s (2001) study of English and Mandarin temporal concepts. Cultural differences in conversational style are also addressed.

Lexical and cultural categories are discussed in the next section. The author begins by explaining the connection between semantic domains and cultural interest, followed by a discussion of componential analysis. Next, the author addresses different ways to classify lexical items, such as by gender or animacy, and introduces the student to the idea of fuzzy categories. After a discussion of ethnoscientific taxonomies in language, the chapter describes the sequential distribution of basic color terms as posited by Berlin and Kay (1969) and then introduces focal meaning and prototypes. The final portion of this section is devoted to describing different ways of conceptualizing space and location and how these different conceptualizations are created by and reflected in language.

The next section addresses cultural presuppositions. In this section, students are introduced to the notion of a cultural presupposition. The author explains how such