LING 156 Final Practice Exam

Includes some relevant questions from the Midterm Practice Exam & Midterm Exam

NOTE: This practice exam is extra long!!

The actual structure of the Final Exam will be:

10 Multiple Choice questions 20% of your total grade

10 True/False questions 20%
10 Short Answer questions 20%
6 Short Essay questions 40%

Part I: Multiple Choice (only 10 questions of this type on the Final Exam, at 2pts each)

1. /t/-release indirectly indexing 'gay diva' depends on:

a. homophobia
b. context
c. agency
d. face

2. The most active participants in creating the “Father Knows Best” dinnertime
dynamic according to Ochs & Taylor’s 1995 analysis were:

a. the fathers
b. the mothers
c. the children
d. the siblings

3. A single lecture is an example of a:

a. speech situation
b. speech activity
c. speech event
d. speech act

4. Your communicative competence is constrained by your:

a. meaning-making rights
b. iconicity
c. prediscursivity
d. naturalization
5. What is the discursive process that is challenged by an analysis of
masculinity that considers socioeconomic class or sexuality?

a. indexicality
b. discourse
c. erasure
d. agency
e. all of the above

6. The linguistic style known as Japanese Women’s Language has become a

commodified part of Japan’s:

a. Samurai Class language

b. post-modern rebellion
c. national identity
d. young popular culture

7. A study of ‘G-dropping,’ as in runnin’ vs. running, is an example of:

a. phonetic/phonological variation
b. semantic change-in-progress
c. critical discourse analysis
d. lexical/syntactic variation

8. Mendoza-Denton argues that longer silences after Clarence Thomas’

statements than Anita Hill’s statements:

a. rendered Thomas powerless

b. gave weight and sympathy to Thomas
c. rendered Thomas silent
d. cast doubt on Thomas’ argument

9. The idea of the Linguistic Market comes from:

a. Robin Lakoff
b. Sally McConnell-Ginet
c. Rob Podesva
d. Pierre Bourdieu

10. The vocal pitch level of a person is determined by:

a. vocal tract length

b. gender socialization
c. both of the above
d. neither of the above


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11. The “Father Knows Best” dynamic is an example of:

a. radical feminism
b. variation
c. patriarchy
d. legibility

12. Which is evidence that sexual dimorphism is a social construct:

a. the shift in the connotations of the terms homosexual and gay

b. preferences by little boys for toy trucks
c. perceiving Uptalk differently depending on the gender of the speaker
d. categories of sexual behavior in ancient Rome

13. A ‘global’ linguistic market is usually associated with:

a. working-class speech
b. vernacular speech
c. standard speech
d. masculine speech

14. Which one could best be described as a community of practice?

a. Students who go to Palo Alto High School

b. A group of 9th graders who enjoy school-oriented activities
c. People who live in Palo Alto
d. Stanford students
e. People who speak a Southern dialect of English

15. Keisling argues that the word dude, when used by members of a college
fraternity, can:

a. mitigate negative face threats

b. be interpreted as an insult
c. introduce performative speech acts
d. index homosexual orientation

16. Which is not a potential sociolinguistic variable:

a. the word hella vs. the word mad

b. she’s about 6 feet tall vs. she’s around to 6 feet tall
c. creaky voice vs. modal voice
d. fronted /a/ vs. backed /a/
e. give me the cup vs. give the cup to me
f. I be studying vs. I am studying


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17. Podesva’s (2007) analysis of falsetto argues that falsetto indirectly indexes:

a. politeness & a ‘queen’ identity

b. expressiveness & a ‘queen’ identity
c. politeness & a ‘diva’ persona
d. expressiveness & a ‘diva’ persona

18. The phone sex workers Kira Hall (1995) interviewed were:

a. men and women who performed white voices

b. men and women who performed voices of various ethnicities
c. only women, performing white voices
d. only women, performing voices of various ethnicities

19. Proposing a theory of multiple masculinities helps counteract which

semiotic process:

a. discursivity
b. homophobia
c. performance
d. erasure

20. What aspect of performance most provides the opportunity for speakers to create
positive social change?

a. iterability
b. iconicization
c. pejoration
d. indexicality

Part II: True/False (only 10 questions of this type on the Final Exam, at 2pts each)

1. Single mothers live non-heteronormative lifestyles.

T / F

2. The deictics here and there are examples of direct indexicality.

T / F

3. Gossip can be distinguished from shop talk based purely on linguistic criteria.

T / F


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4. Whether you’re talking to a woman or a man may influence how you perceive
that speaker’s consonants.

T / F

5. Descriptive linguists aims to establish a Standard Grammar of English.

T / F

6. Science defines how people think about gender.

T / F

7. Separating men's and women's sports is an example of institutional homophobia.

T / F

8. Queer Theory argues that pornography enforces the gender binary.

T / F

9. Telling someone they have toilet paper stuck to their shoe threatens a person’s
positive face.

T / F

10. Behavior has been shown to alter hormone levels and other brain chemistry.

T / F

11. Babies with intersex genitalia are more common in some societies than others.

T / F

12. People who identify as homosexual are not part of the heterosexual market.

T / F

13. Many studies have found that men use more non-standard linguistic variables than
women do.

T / F

14. The relationship between linguistic form and social meaning is usually direct.

T / F


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15. Fraternity members’ use of dude may be considered homosocial behavior.

T / F

16. Small town cultures always orient more toward negative face than positive face.

T / F

17. In Gal (1978), men prefer using Hungarian regardless of their peasant networks.

T / F

18. Lera Boroditsky argues that grammatical gender may be stored in our minds in
connection to social gender.

T / F

19. Barrett (1999) argues for a single linguistic style used by African American Drag
Queens.

T / F

20. Performative speech acts are statements that accomplish actions.

T / F

Part III: Short Answer (only 10 questions of this type on the Final Exam, at 2pts each)

1. In the United States, technical masculinity is associated with ________ class,

whereas physical masculinity is associated with ________ class.

___________________________ ; __________________________

2. Give an example of an Imagined Community:

_______________________________________________________

3. Give an example of a Speech Activity and its parallel Speech Event:

_______________________________________________________

4. Name one social institution other than school or work where gender is
constructed.

_______________________________________________________


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5. The Whorfian Hypothesis is also called the idea of Linguistic ____:

_______________________________________________________

6. One social category that interacts with gender and sexuality is race or ethnicity.
Name another social category that interacts with gender and sexuality:

_______________________________________________________

7. Hlonipa particularly impacted Khoi-San women marrying ____ men:

_______________________________________________________

8. In Eckert's analysis, the gender order shifts as kids approach

adolescence, going from __________ to __________.

___________________________ ; __________________________

9. Give one example of a word related to gender or sexuality that has

undergone perjoration:

_______________________________________________________

10. The word seminal is an example of a(n) ________ metaphor, at least

among most speakers of English:

_______________________________________________________

11. Synthetic Sisterhood is an example of a(n) ________ community:

_______________________________________________________

12. Give an example of heteronormativity in television:

_______________________________________________________

13. “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” is a _________ Speech Act:

_______________________________________________________

14. Meaning making rights depends on the ability to:

_______________________________________________________


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15. The process of coming to believe that ideologies are common sense is called:

_______________________________________________________

16. Name one specific critique against Lakoff 1972:

_______________________________________________________

17. Name one strategy that was used by the producer of the magazine
Jackie to construct the synthetic sisterhood:

_______________________________________________________

18. Hijras (as in the movie, Bombay Eunuch) refer to themselves in the present by
using ______ pronouns.

_______________________________________________________

19. What is the language of societal power in the global linguistic market?

_______________________________________________________

20. The _______ hypothesis refers to a thinking the ability to acquire language is
biologically linked to age. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time to
acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which language
acquisition is no longer possible due to changes in the brain.

_______________________________________________________

Part IV: Short Essay

1. Gender and sexual orientation are socially constructed in overlapping ways. Show
how this is the case using the examples of American cross-dressers and feminists.

2. What is the difference between a Community of Practice and an Imagined

Community? Support with examples.

3. Argue for the position that using food/drink metaphors to refer to women
constructs the gender order.

4. What do we mean by the statement “gender and sexuality are not prediscursive”?

5. Why should you be skeptical of a research study that argues to have proven that
men interrupt women more than women interrupt men? What would you ask that
researcher?


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6. How does Keisling 2004 suggest that the use of “dude” may be connected to
either hegemonic masculinity or homophobia, in the community he analyzed?

7. How do medicine and science shift sexuality from behaviors to identities?

8. “Drawing category boundaries is often an exercise of social power.” Discuss,

using examples from Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, Chapter 7.

9. How do the performances of African American Drag Queens support a theory like
LePage & Tabouret-Keller’s “Acts of Identity,” according to Barrett (1999)?

10. How does recursivity reinforce the gender binary? Give examples.

11. Imagine that you have a friend who does not understand the problem of gender
stereotyping language because there clearly is a difference between how men and
women talk. How would you respond to your friend?

12. Give an example of how heterosexuality is constructed in magazine

advertisements.

13. How are bathroom choice, and the higher frequency of urinary tract infections in
some populations, related to the construction of gender?

14. How are ritual “closings,” or conversational endings, evidence that politeness
norms are part of our communicative competence?

15. How was the practice of Hlonipa important in structuring the Zulu language?

16. What was the role of novels in the construction of Japanese Women’s Language?

17. Use the example of ‘Uptalk’ (or ‘HRT’) to describe how speech is
multifunctional.

18. Give an example of study in which the use of a variable (or variables) is linked to
constructing one's identity, and explain it in detail (make sure you use the
following terms in your discussion: local categories, variables, identities, and
social meanings)

19. Sociolinguistics has its roots in the study of dialect differences, in which
geography places a major role. Some researchers believe that there are mountain
ranges between different social categories, too: between Whites and Blacks, for
example. How useful is this notion in the study of language and gender?

20. This course has focused on the social construction of gender. How does this
square with anatomical, chemical, and functional differences that neuroscientists
are finding when comparing the brains of men and women?


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