RELEVANT ENVIRONMENTAL PARAMETERS

TRUE FALSE QUESTIONNAIRE

- Read the sentences and choose true or false and back up your
answers.

I. CULTURAL FACTORS
1. Cultural praxis, that is, the set of conscious behaviours and beliefs that
are not associated with the expression of a coherent social identity of a
specific community.

TRUE / FALSE :
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2. An extreme form of the influence of culture on language is language

construction or manipulation as a deliberate cultural activity.

TRUE / FALSE :
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3. Gender-based distinctions haven’t often been linked to grammatical

developments in various languages and to language change in general.
TRUE / FALSE :
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II. SOCIAL FACTORS

4. The dialectal variation, for instance, does not typically arise from
deliberate choices made by the respective communities, but is also
influenced by rather abstract phenomena such as the degree of
isolation of the community (Schreier, 2009).
TRUE / FALSE :
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5. Siegel (2009) – argues that a major factor of grammatical change is the

relative stability of a society, its social density, and its degree of
isolation. He hypothesizes that small, relatively stable societies with a
relatively high social density are disproportionately more likely to
develop complex morphosyntactic feature systems.
TRUE / FALSE :
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III. GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS

6. The influence of geography and the geophysical environment on

various aspects of grammar has been a prolific subject of study, its
universally perceived importance surpassing linguistic ideologies and
traditional divisions between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
TRUE / FALSE :
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 7. Enfield (1992) introduces the notions of spread zones and residual
zones as two geophysical types that have a distinctive influence on
language diversification.
TRUE / FALSE :
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8. Nettle(1996, 1998) comes to very similar conclusions and attributes

this phenomenon to the fact that, particularly in pre-modern societies,
tropical and subtropical climates are more conducive to year-round
agriculture and as such allow for the sustained existence of smaller
social groups that for their survival do not need to engage with external
groups, for instance through trade. This isolating factor in turn leads to
increased linguistic diversity.
TRUE / FALSE :
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IV. NATURAL FACTORS

9. Moore, 1993 try to establish correlations between particular natural or
ecological indicators and linguistic diversity. Invariably, they are
looking for direct correlations: it is generally assumed that cultural and
linguistic diversity don´t increase with ecological diversity.
TRUE / FALSE :
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10. In extreme cases, cataclysmic events such as floods, earthquakes or

volcanic eruptions can wipe out entire language communities.
TRUE / FALSE :
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V. HUMAN BIOLOGY

11. Kemp et al. (2010), who doesn´t use DNA analysis to reconstruct ethnic
diversity.
TRUE / FALSE :
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VI. META-PERCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

12. One often-ignored influence on linguistic structure is the very act of
conducting linguistic research and, more broadly, our perception of use
of English.
TRUE / FALSE :
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