Real Reference: A Study Tool
Now that you have finished reading this chapter, you can:
Describe the power of language—the system of symbols we use to think about and communicate experiences and feelings:
- Words are symbols that have meanings agreed to by speakers of a language (p. 66).
- Cognitive language is what you use to describe people, things, and situations in your mind (p. 67).
- Correct grammar, the rules of a language, helps ensure clarity (p. 67).
- Communication accommodation theory illustrates how people should adapt their language and nonverbal behaviors to the person, group, or context (p. 68).
- Learning words and how to use them effectively is the process of communication acquisition (p. 68).
Identify how language helps people communicate—the five functional communication competencies:
- As an instrument of control (p. 69).
- For informing, including four aspects: questioning, describing, reinforcing, and withholding (p. 69).
- For expressing feelings to let people know how we value them (p. 70).
- For imagining, communicating a creative idea (p. 71).
- For ritualizing, managing conversations and relationships (p. 71).
Describe the ways that communicators create meaning with language:
- Semantics refers to the meaning that words have; pragmatics refers to the ability to use them appropriately (p. 72).
- A denotative meaning is the accepted definition of a word; its connotative meaning is the emotional or attitudinal response to it (p. 72).
- The abstraction ladder ranks communication from specific, which ensures clarity, to general and vague (p. 73).
- Some communication situations may call for abstractions: evasion, avoiding specifics; equivocation, using unclear terms; or euphemisms, using substitutions for possibly upsetting terms (p. 74).
- Slang is a group’s informal language; jargon is a group’s technical language (p. 74).
Label problematic uses of language and their remedies:
- Hatespeech is language that offends, threatens, or insults a person or group based on race, color, gender, or other identifiable characteristics (p. 76) whereas hurtful language includes words or expressions that are considered inappropriate, pretentious, damaging, mean, sarcastic, or offensive to others (p. 76).
- We ignore individual differences when we place gender, ethnic, or other role labels on people (pp. 76–77).
- Biased language has subtle meanings that influence perception negatively (pp. 77–78); using politically correct language attempts to meet culturally appropriate norms (p. 78).
- Profanity involves expressions that are considered insulting, rude, vulgar, or disrespectful (p. 79).
- Civility involves language that meets socially appropriate norms (p. 79).
Describe how language reflects, builds on, and determines context:
- We use different speech repertoires to find the most effective language for a given situation (p. 80).
- Code switching is a type of accommodation in which communicators change from one repertoire or “code” to another as the situation warrants (p. 80).
- High language is a more formal, polite, or “mainstream” language (p. 81).
- Low language is more informal and often involves slang (p. 81).
- We use language to create or reflect the context of a relationship (pp. 82–83).
- The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or linguistic relativity theory) suggests that our words influence our thinking (p. 83) by shaping or determining how we see the world; thus, speakers of different languages have different views of the world (p. 83).
- Although assuming that there are gender differences in communication can be misleading, some differences in masculine and feminine language exist. The use of interruptions, intensifiers, qualifiers, hedges, disclaimers, tag questions and resistance messages is linked with feminine versus masculine speech patterns (p. 85).
- The culture of the geographical area affects language (p. 86).
- Although communication technology has made English the dominant world language and has created a global society, the Internet also continues to create a language of its own (p. 87).