SACE Stage 2 Language and Culture flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Register

A configuration of field, tenor, and mode that predicts lexical and syntactic choices; it ranges from frozen and formal through consultative and informal to intimate, signalled by lexis, syntax, and address forms.

Cohesion versus coherence

Cohesion is the explicit surface linking of a text through reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical reiteration; coherence is the underlying logical unity that a reader or listener perceives.

Phoneme versus allophone

A phoneme is a contrastive sound unit established by minimal pairs such as pin and bin; an allophone is a contextually conditioned, non-contrastive variant of one phoneme.

Derivational versus inflectional affix

A derivational affix creates a new lexeme and may change word class, as un- in unhappy; an inflectional affix marks grammatical information such as tense, number, or case without creating a new lexeme.

Grice's cooperative principle

Four maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner) describe default communicative cooperation; deliberately flouting a maxim generates implicature, which is meaning conveyed beyond what is literally said.

Speech act theory

Locution is the utterance itself, illocution is the intended act such as promising or warning, and perlocution is the effect on the hearer; felicity conditions determine whether the act succeeds.

Lexical versus grammatical cohesion

Lexical cohesion works through repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation; grammatical cohesion works through reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.

Transitivity participant roles

Clause analysis assigns roles such as actor, goal, sensor, and sayer across process types including material, mental, verbal, and relational; passive voice backgrounds the actor and foregrounds the goal.

Epistemic versus deontic modality

Epistemic modality expresses degrees of certainty (may, must); deontic modality expresses degrees of obligation or permission (must, should); modal choice signals stance and relative authority.

Code-switching types

Code-switching may be inter-sentential, intra-sentential, or tag-switching; it performs identity, solidarity, topic management, or lexical gap-filling functions rather than indicating confusion.

Pidgin, creole, lingua franca

A pidgin is a reduced contact language with no native speakers; a creole arises when a pidgin is acquired natively and expands; a lingua franca is a shared contact language among speakers of different first languages.

Morphological typology

Languages are classified as isolating (little inflection), agglutinative (chained distinct affixes), fusional (combined meanings in one affix), or polysynthetic (many morphemes per word).

Deixis

Deixis encodes context dependence through person (I, you), place (here, there), and time (now, then); deictic expressions cannot be interpreted without knowing the speaking situation.

Theme and rheme

Theme is the clause element placed first and treated as the point of departure; rheme is the remainder. Thematic progression patterns describe how topics thread through a text.

Prescriptivism versus descriptivism

Prescriptivism states how a variety ought to be used; descriptivism records how it is actually used. Standard and non-standard varieties are each internally rule-governed systems.

Lexical density

Lexical density is the number of content words divided by the number of clauses; it rises in formal written academic prose and falls in conversation, making it a reliable register indicator.

Semantic prosody

Semantic prosody is the consistent positive or negative aura a word acquires across its habitual collocates, as when cause typically collocates with negative outcomes; it is invisible in dictionary definitions.

Hofstede's cultural dimensions

National tendency scores for power distance, individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence–restraint; they are population averages, not predictions about individuals.

High-context versus low-context

Hall's continuum describes how much meaning is carried by setting, relationship, and shared history (high context) versus explicitly in the code (low context); it describes tendencies, not fixed national essences.

Face-threatening acts

Acts that damage positive face (the desire for approval) or negative face (the desire for autonomy); redress strategies include hedging, indirectness, deference, and joking, weighted by power, distance, and imposition.

Ethnocentrism versus cultural relativism

Ethnocentrism judges other groups by one's own norms as the standard; cultural relativism interprets practices within their own context. Neither stance removes the need for evidence and ethical reasoning.

Berry's acculturation strategies

Crossing heritage-culture maintenance with host-culture contact yields integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation; integration generally correlates with the best adaptation outcomes.

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The strong version (linguistic determinism) claims language fixes thought and lacks empirical support; the weak version (linguistic relativity) claims language influences habitual attention and categorisation.

Domestication versus foreignisation

Translation strategies: domestication adapts the text to target-culture norms for fluency, while foreignisation retains source-culture markers; the choice trades readability against cultural fidelity.

Accommodation theory

Convergence adjusts speech toward an interlocutor to signal solidarity; divergence maintains or exaggerates difference to signal distance or distinctiveness. Both are strategic responses to social context.

Monochronic versus polychronic time

Monochronic orientation emphasises schedules, punctuality, and task focus; polychronic orientation emphasises relationships and overlapping activities. Neither pattern is deficient; each shapes meeting behaviour.

Cultural keywords

Terms with dense, culture-specific meaning that resist single-word translation; analysing their collocations and connotations reveals underlying cultural values and assumptions.

Language shift and revitalisation

Language shift follows domain loss, especially when a language leaves education, media, or public life; revitalisation depends on restoring domains of use and community control, not documentation alone.

Universalist versus particularist

Trompenaars' dimension contrasting obligation to abstract rules (universalism) with obligation to relationships and context (particularism); it predicts different responses to the same ethical dilemma.

Cultural relativism in analysis

Suspending judgement long enough to understand a practice in its own terms; it does not require endorsing practices that violate widely held ethical standards, and it must be supported by evidence.

Intercultural communicative competence

Competence combining attitudes (curiosity, openness), knowledge (of self and other), and skills (interpreting, relating, discovering); awareness of one's own culture is the starting point.

Ecological fallacy

Inferring an individual's behaviour or traits from a group average, such as applying a national cultural dimension score to one person; a common error in intercultural analysis.