Regional Naming Patterns and the Culture of Honor--论文代写范文精选

南部和西部的公民更有可能比北方人更大胆,认为他们的孩子应该打架如果受到欺负，在最近的一系列研究,尼斯贝特和科恩认为,这些地区差异反映了文化出现在南部和西部边境的差异。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
Throughout American history, violence has been more common in southern and western states than in northern states. Violence continues to be viewed more positively and constructively in these regions. This paper tests whether these regional differences in violent behaviors and attitudes have had linguistic consequences, in particular for name usage. Study 1 shows that place names in the South and West are more likely than place names in the North to begin with violent words like "gun" (e.g., Gun Point, FL) and "war" (e.g., War, WV). Study 2 extends this phenomenon beyond place name "fossils" to contemporary name choices by showing that business names in the South and West are more likely than those in the North to begin with violent words. Implications of these naming patterns for the maintenance of regional differences in violence are discussed.

Introduction

The incidence, acceptance, and endorsement of violence vary strikingly across different regions of the United States. Per capita homicide rates are higher in southern and western states than in northern states (Baron and Straus 1988; Nisbett, 1993). Guns ownership is more common in these regions and gun control laws are more lax (Cohen 1996). Southern and western citizens are more likely than northerners to subscribe to "macho" magazines (Lee 1995), play college football (Baron and Straus 1989), endorse corporal punishment for children (Cohen and Nisbett 1994), and believe that their children should fight bullies rather than reason with them (Cohen and Nisbett 1994).
In a series of recent papers, Nisbett and Cohen have argued that these regional differences reflect a "culture of honor" that arose in the frontier South and West because of their historical herding economies coupled with the lack of effective law enforcement. Livestock rustlers can quickly destroy a herder's livelihood. This danger would be quite palpable even if The Law were available since both thieves and booty could be long gone before a search party was mobilized. In frontier America, even this measure of law enforcement was often absent, and so herders were left to fend for themselves. In such an environment, herders deterred prospective thieves with a tough demeanor and an honor code that advertised one's family and property as sacred. Any violation of that sanctity would be met with quick and harsh retaliation.

Evidence for this "culture of honor" has been obtained through ethnographic, survey, and experimental investigations. First, culture of honor characteristics have appeared consistently in herding societies around the world (Schneider 1971). Second, attitude surveys have found that southern and western Americans do not condone violent responses to triggering events across the board. Rather, they differ from northern Americans only when honor is at stake (Cohen and Nisbett 1994). Furthermore, regional differences in homicide rates are restricted to violations of personal honor, such as barroom insults (Nisbett 1993). Third, southern and western businesses show more sympathy to job applicants who have criminal records when the crime involves a defense of honor than when it does not. Finally, when insulted, southern males respond with more anger than northern males and show stronger physiological signs of stress and aggression (e.g., increases in cortisol and testosterone levels; Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle and Schwartz 1996).

Although the frontier history shared by the South and West could account for their similarities, there is some evidence that the South is significantly more violent than the West. For example, whereas southern and western juries in capital cases recommend the death penalty at equal rates, these sentences are actually carried out more frequently in the South. School discipline in the South is also more likely to involve corporal punishment (Cohen 1996). Cohen attributes these patterns to the long history of slavery and post- slavery racial subjugation in the South, where white dominance was maintained by both state sanctioned and vigilante violence. Cohen provided further evidence for this attribution by predicting and finding subpatterns in measures of violence within the South. In particular, he reasoned that states with greater levels of slavery should show higher levels of violence. He therefore compared the upper South and the lower South on various measures of violence. In comparison with slave states in the lower South like Alabama and Georgia, those in the upper South, such as Maryland and Delaware, had relatively small slave populations and remained in the Union during the Civil War. These historical differences are correlated with contemporary differences in institutionalized violence. Thus, death sentences have been carried out much more frequently in the lower South than in the upper South. Corporal punishment is also used in school discipline more often in the lower South.

In sum, extensive evidence has implicated important historical antecedents in southern and western violence. Still, it is not clear why these regional patterns persist when their precipitating conditions--slavery and/or a precarious herding lifestyle in a dangerous frontier--no longer exist. In their work on the culture of honor, Cohen and Nisbett (1997) suggest that various institutional forces may help to maintain this culture and its violent consequences. For example, Cohen and Nisbett found that college newspapers in southern and western states showed more sympathy than northern newspapers to crimes committed in defense of honor (e.g., a stabbing provoked by an insult to one's sister). No regional differences were found in descriptions of a robbery, which did not involve an honor violation. The survival of certain "culture of honor" patterns in the legal systems of southern and western states might also reinforce congruent attitudes. For example, northern states generally have "retreat rules," whereby a person must first attempt to retreat from a potential assailant before giving a more violent defense. Legal codes in southern and western states lack such rules, and historical analysis indicates that residents viewed them as humiliating affronts to personal honor (Cohen 1996). Current residents of southern and western states could assimilate certain attitudes toward violence through exposure to such legal codes and other institutions established during the frontier period and, due to their conservative nature, surviving its demise.

In this paper, I will test whether certain linguistic patterns exist that reflect the prominence of violence in the South and West, and might help to promote the continued acceptability of violence in these areas. In particular, I will focus on regional differences in the prevalence of proper names that have violent connotations, such as names of locations (e.g., "Murderer's Creek") and businesses (e.g., "Gunbarrel Liquors"). Naming is a very important linguistic behavior personally and socially. Names testify to family and cultural identity, reinforce the values associated with those identifications, and advertise them publicly (e.g., Fischer 1989). To the extent that violence is more salient and positively valued in the South and West than in the North, then names with violent connotations should be more prevalent in those regions of the United States.

Violence in Place names

Many places throughout the United States have names based on proper nouns, such as people of local, national, or international importance. But proper names have not been the sole source of American place names as many sites have been dubbed with common nouns, such as "Ash Grove," NY and "Lobster Cove," ME. In addition to choosing locally important (and innocuous) fruits and animals for place names, however, Americans have also named some sites after violent objects ("Guntown," MS), actions ("Murder Hill," NY), and persons ("Cutthroat Gulch," CA). Given the history of violence in the South and West, such names should be more prevalent there than in the North. Regional differences should be less apparent for place names that lack violent connotations.

Method

Regional definitions Southern, western, and northern regions of the continental United States were defined according to Cohen and Nisbett (1997), who in turn relied on census classifications. The sixteen southern states were Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia (Census Divisions 5, 6, and 7). The eleven western states were Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming (Census Divisions 8 and 9). The remaining twenty-one states were considered northern.

Place name source. The United States Geological Survey's on-line database of place names was the source for this study's data (Internet address: www-nmd.usgs.gov/www/gnis). The database, known as the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS; see McArthur 1995 and Payne 1995, for further information), returned all place names in its registry that began with the keywords described in the next section, along with the state and county in which each place was located, and the type of feature so identified (e.g., lake, summit, park, populated place like a city or town). Unfortunately, the current version of the GNIS search engine does not return places that contain a keyword in non-initial position. However, language comprehension research indicates that words at the beginning of phrases are particularly memorable (Gernsbacher and Hargreaves 1988), and so it seems reasonable to focus on place names that start with violent words.

Violent keywords and controls. The following procedure was used to select keywords with violent meanings. First, I searched the electronic version of the American Heritage Dictionary for all words that contained "weapon," "firearm," "armed," "combat," "conflict," "kill," "killer," "murder," "murderer," "criminal," "violent," or "violence" in their definitions. These words were selected because they appeared in the definitions of many salient violent words, such as "gun," "bullet," and "war." This search returned 638 words, with phrases like "foul play" and proper nouns excluded. However, many of these items had multiple meanings, some of which were nonviolent. For example, "cutthroat" can refer to a type of trout as well as a murderer. "Sight" can denote the sense of vision or an aiming device on a firearm. Hence, it is not clear that place names beginning with such words derive from violent meanings. To verify that each place name draws upon the violent meaning of its initial word would be a prodigious undertaking. However, a safeguard was imposed to reduce the ambiguity problem. In particular, words were only considered violent if their primary meaning in The American Heritage Dictionary contained one or more of the words used to obtain the original list (e.g., "weapon"). Thus, "cutthroat" was included because its murderer meaning is primary. "Sight," on the other hand, was excluded because its dominant visual sense meaning did not involve violence. This definitional criterion led to the removal of 439 words from the list.1 A representative sample of the remaining 199 words was drawn for place name analysis. Words were selected quasirandomly in that the odds of selection were proportional to word frequency, with frequency values obtained from Francis and Kucera (1984). The frequency bias was used to increase the chances that a large number of places would be involved in the analysis. Words were submitted to the GNIS search engine in order of selection until twenty successful searches were obtained. A search was considered successful if the GNIS returned at least ten place names within the 48 contiguous states that began with the target keyword. To meet this constraint, 34 words were actually submitted to the GNIS search engine, but accused, assassin, attack, combat, conflict, corps, destroy, duel, fling, invasion, rebellion, strife, tripwire, and violent produced fewer than ten matches. The 20 words that met the frequency requirement are listed in Appendix 1. They include names for weapons (e.g., "gun," "bomb"), violent persons (e.g., "cutthroat," "outlaw"), and events (e.g., "murder," "war"). To extend the range of the sample, the results included morphological variants for each keyword. For example, the tallies for "gun" included place names beginning with "gunpowder," "gunbarrel," and "guntown" among others. Similarly, "warpath," "warrior," and related words were included in the counts for "war."

Some of the selected keywords, such as "spear," could pose interpretive problems because they have surname uses. There are three reasons why such ambiguities do not appear serious, however. First, if surnames with violent connotations are distributed uniformly throughout American place names, then regional differences in common noun usage will be diluted. Hence, the surname ambiguity would only underestimate regional differences. Second, if the violent connotations of some surnames make them attractive place names for southerners and westerners, then their use provides another reflection of regional values. Third, suppose many place names beginning with "spear" derive historically from a personal name. Most Americans who currently live in or near these sites would not be aware of the historical background of the place names, and so would tend to interpret them in terms of their common violent meanings.

To test adequately the hypothesis that violent place names cluster in the South and West, control words are needed to rule out artifactual accounts of the results. For instance, there are 27 southern and western states in the analysis, compared with 21 northern states. Furthermore, the former states comprise a much larger surface area than the latter, and hence have more potential places to name. Any name type might then be more common in the South and West than in the North. The following procedure was therefore used to obtain a set of 20 control words. First, proper names like "Franklin" were excluded from consideration as control words since the violent word set consisted of common nouns, verbs, and adjectives rather than names. The control set should have a similar makeup. Next, to increase the ease of finding common words that serve as place names, a dictionary of American place names was consulted (Stewart 1970). This dictionary was sampled by randomly selecting a page and then submitting the first common word entry to the GNIS database. If the names of ten or more locations began with that word, it was included in the control set. This random selection process continued until 20 control words were obtained. Twenty-four words needed to be sampled to obtain 20 items that met the frequency requirement. The four words that did not meet the frequency criterion were abalone, bauxite, curiosity, and emblem. The control words are listed in Appendix 1. As can be seen, the meanings of the control words are clearly less fierce than those of the violent words.

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