ENG 235 Final, Fall 2004

Engl 235 Fall 2004 Prof. Lina Choueiri January 28, 2005 Final Exam Coed bstokl PartI Provide a definition for THREE of the following terms. Your definition should also include a statement linking the term in question to a broader issue within the politics of language. Provide examples where appropriate. (15 pés) 1. Negative collocations 2. Linguistic genocide 3. Systems of address 4. World Englishes 5. Taboo words Part True or False. (Don’t provide ANY justifications for your answers) (10 pts) 1. The importance of accent as a label of identity is evident in that this is the aspect of their language that speakers most frequently change. 2. The term ethnic in such expressions like ‘ethnic music’ or ‘ethnic food’ has come to denote anything perceived as racially or culturally different from the mainstream. 3. Phillipson and Pennycook agree that believing that the spread of English is a neutral phenomenon is based on the assumption that English can be disconnected from its cultural, social, and political reality. 4. The use of words like ‘nigger’ among people of Afro-American ethnicity is an example of negative labelling. 5. Naming practices as well as how people use names to address other people help establish one’s personal identity in a given context. 6. Itis observed that multilingualism in countries like Britain or the United States of America is seen as threatening and subversive and opposed to images of the society as ideally homogeneous. 7. The natural spread of English is based on the assumption that English spread is the inevitable result of global forces. 8. English imperialism refers to the idea that the dominance of English in the world is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages. 9. Ethnic identities are multidimensional with characteristics that we can only be ‘born into’ like race or nationality. 10. For Phillipson, Anglocentricity, which takes the forms and functions of English as the norms by which all language activity or usc should be measured, results in devaluing other languages, either implicitely or explicitely. Part III Write a meaningful essay on the following topic. Focus on making your essay coherent and your argumentation rigorous, by being as cleat as possible and using appropriate examples and terminology. (25ptx) Social divisions such as in-group/ out-group, periphery/core, us/them, and majority/minoriy divisions are played out in language use. Using well- developed examples, show how language can be said to represent and reinforce such divisions and be a tool for resistance against them. From your discussion can you draw any conclusions for language education?