Sociolinguistics Questions and Answers

Answer: C

'Autonomous literacy' (the autonomous model of literacy) is a term associated with Brian Street, who contrasted it with the ideological model in Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984). The autonomous model treats literacy as a neutral technical skill independent of social context, and he argued that literacy is always social.

John Gumperz is associated with interactional sociolinguistics, Joshua Fishman with sociology of language and language planning, and R.B. Le Page with creole studies and acts of identity. None of these coined the contrast named in the question.

Answer: A

The correct matches are: communicative competence with Dell Hymes (iv), the verbal deficit hypothesis with Basil Bernstein (iii), diglossia with Charles Ferguson (ii) and the social motivation of sound change with William Labov (i). The code is (iv), (iii), (ii), (i).

Hymes proposed communicative competence in answer to Chomsky's competence; Bernstein's restricted and elaborated codes gave the deficit idea; Ferguson wrote 'Diglossia' (1959); and Labov's New York and Martha's Vineyard studies showed social motives for change. The other codes mismatch at least two names.

Answer: A

The claim that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and think about the world is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity). Whorf's study of Hopi time concepts is the usual illustration.

Communicative competence concerns knowing how to use language appropriately (Hymes). Language contact theory is about changes when speech communities meet. The speech act theory (Austin, Searle) studies what we do with utterances, so none of these claims that language shapes thought.

Answer: C

Polygenesis is the theory that pidgins and creoles arose independently in different places, as against monogenesis, which traces them all to a single origin such as a Portuguese-based pidgin. So polygenesis studies the origins of pidgins and creoles.

It does not concern sociolinguistic variation in general, regional and social dialects or styles and registers, although those also belong to sociolinguistics. Option C is the key.

Answer: A

The key is the vernacular principle: in Allan Bell's account, as given in the question, the style shift most regular in structure and in relation to the language's history is the vernacular, the style in which least attention is paid to speech. It is the baseline against which other styles are measured.

The principle of convergence refers to accommodating the speech of the other person, and the principle of attention (Labov) says that style depends on how much attention is paid to speech. 'Style-shifting' is the general name of the phenomenon and not a principle with this property.

Answer: A

The key takes pidgins as the extreme cases of borrowing. A pidgin takes most of its vocabulary from one or more lexifier languages and has a simplified grammar, so it can be seen as the extreme point of the borrowing scale in contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman's view of the scale of contact).

Creoles are nativised pidgins with expanded structure, creoloids are languages that resemble creoles without a pidgin ancestry, and the acrolect is the prestigious variety at the top of a creole continuum. They are not the extreme cases of borrowing according to the key.

Answer: D

Critical literacy is strongly associated with the work of Paulo Freire (printed 'Pant preire'), the Brazilian educator who taught reading as a way of understanding and changing the conditions of one's life.

Hodge and Kress worked on social semiotics, Clark and Ivanic on critical language awareness, and Widdowson on applied linguistics and discourse, so they are not the ones linked with critical literacy in this sense.

Answer: A

The key takes both statements as true. Basil Bernstein held that every speaker has access to the restricted code, used among people who share many assumptions. Access to the elaborated code, which makes meaning explicit, was linked by him to the higher social classes, and the key reads the second statement in that sense.

The options calling either statement false are rejected by the key. Bernstein's own account spoke of the middle class, which is a point to check.

Answer: C

In a language contact situation the language that gives most of the lexical items to the contact variety (a pidgin or creole) is the lexifier language. The word comes from creole studies, where the lexifier is often a European language.

Lexicalization is the process by which a concept becomes a word, lexical diffusion is the spread of a sound change through the words of a language, and lexical decision is a psycholinguistic experimental task, so they are not the language that supplies the vocabulary.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-iv, b-i, c-ii, d-iii. Corpus planning was a term coined by Heinz Kloss. Language planning is credited to Uriel Weinreich. Language determination is credited to Charles Ferguson, and language spread to Robert Cooper.

This is code (A). Codes (B), (C) and (D) give Kloss's term to others, or assign planning to Cooper or Ferguson, which does not match the key. Kloss also separated status planning from corpus planning, and Cooper wrote on language spread, which links each name to its term.