Week 4 — Four Words, Two Registers: Hearing the Market as Language — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 4 of the term — hear the market's talk as language, weigh a famous debate about words and thought, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met language and communication, design features such as arbitrariness and displacement, dialect, register, and code-switching, the strong and weak forms of linguistic relativity, nonverbal communication and proxemics, and language endangerment. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3, where you first marked the vendor's emic terms.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market constructed for this course, not a real place. Its illustrative vendor interview has 5 questions and 5 answers, and the vendor uses four emic terms: "regulars", "seconds", "the swap", and "the bell". In field-note entry 4, at 8:20 a.m. at the produce stall, a vendor greets a shopper with "The usual?" and bags two pounds of apples before the shopper asks; with a first-time buyer, in an illustrative contrast, the same vendor explains the produce, what seconds are, and the price. A friend hears you are studying language and says, "Words like 'seconds' and 'the swap' are lazy slang, and if you don't have a word for something, you can't even see it." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers about the interview, the market's prices, and four dates.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. In the running fieldwork site's illustrative vendor interview, the vendor gives 5 answers, and 4 of them carry an emic term in quotation marks. What percent of the answers carry an emic term?
2. At the running fieldwork site, a bin of bruised tomatoes is marked "Seconds" at 2 dollars a pound, half the price of the display tomatoes. How many dollars a pound do the display tomatoes cost?
3. Hockett's design features appeared in 1960, and Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures appeared in 1973. How many years after Hockett's article did Geertz's book appear?
4. Rivers described the genealogical method in 1910, and Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific appeared in 1922. How many years after Rivers's article did Malinowski's book appear?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: write the gloss for two of the four emic terms, and explain, using arbitrariness, why a newcomer to the market has to be taught them.
• Problem 2: describe the vendor's two registers, "The usual?" with a regular and the fuller explanation with a first-time buyer, and explain why the shift is a change of register, not a change of dialect or language.
• Problem 3: try both the strong form and the weak form of linguistic relativity on the word "seconds", and say which form is not supported and which has limited support.
• Problem 4: describe one setting you know, such as a bus stop, an elevator, or a crowded hallway, in two columns, observed and possible interpretation, using proxemics, with people named only by role.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks insider words are lazy slang and that a missing word makes something impossible to see. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains why an insider word such as "seconds" is learned and arbitrary, why every way of speaking follows rules, and why the strong form of linguistic relativity is not supported, and names one limit, including that the market is illustrative and that the weak form does have some support. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a grandparent who says texting abbreviations are ruining the language. Model answer: "Texting shorthand is a register, a style people shift into for a quick message to a friend, and the same people still write full sentences in a job application. Every way of speaking follows its own rules, and every language changes as the people who speak it live. One caveat is fair: someone who does not know the shorthand can be left out, so it fits some settings better than others."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values in the problems without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, explaining why insider words are learned and arbitrary, why every way of speaking follows rules, and why the strong form of linguistic relativity is not supported, with one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled two-column sketch of the personal-space note with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the market only as the course describes it, name people only by role, and do not borrow a word, gesture, or detail about any real people or language community from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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