英语语言学6.doc

Chapter 7 Language, Culture, and Society
Anthropological linguistics: Often simply the study of lesser-known languages through field work. Also, more generally, of any work on language from an anthropological viewpoint: of the use of language in ritual, of vocabulary in relation to culture, of the organization of information in a text, and so on.
Sociolinguistics: Any study of language in relation to society. Commonly, from the late 1960s, of studies of variation in language by Labov and his followers. In that sense, sociolinguistics might be defined as the study of correlations between linguistic variables (e.g. the precise phonetic quality of a vowel (e.g. individuals from different social classes may pronounce ar in different ways), or the presence or absence of a certain element in a construction (e.g. Cicily: When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen: I am glad to say I have never seen a spade. It is obvious our social sphere have been widely different.) and non-linguistic variables such as the social class of speakers, their age, sex, etc. Increasingly, from the end of the 1970s, of the range of loosely connected investigations, including Conversation Analysis (concentrates on relations between successive turns and the operation of a hypothetical turn-taking system) as conducted especially by sociologists, the study of relations in general between language and ideology (as poor as a church mouse vs 穷得房无一间, 地无一垄) or language and power, linguistic aspects of social psychology, etc.
Language and culture
Culture: the characteristics of cultivated man
the life-way of a population
the components of culture:
1） Materials to satisfy human needs
2） Social institutions and organizations
3） Knowledge about the world and artistic development
4） Language and other communication systems
5） Customs, habits and behavioral patterns
6） Value systems, world views, national traits, aesthetic standards and thinking patterns.
Nida:
1) ecological culture
2) linguistic culture
3) religious culture
4) material culture
5) social culture
The anthropological orientation in the study of language
In England
Malinowsky: a functional anthropologist. According to him, language functions as a link in concerted human activity… It is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection. The meaning of language elements greatly depended upon the context of situation in which they occur. ((John’s like a fish.)
Firth: the first professor of linguistics in England and a close friend of Malinowsky. He tried to set up a model for illustrating the close relationship between language use and context of situation which contain the following components:
A. the relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities
(i) The verbal action of the participants
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants
B. The relevant objects
C. The effects of the verbal action
Halliday: a student of Firth and the founder of systemic-functional linguistics that, especially the functional aspect, is also termed as sociosemantics. According to Halliday, the context of situation contains three components:
Field of discourse: the subject matter being discussed.
Tenor of discourse: the social relations between the participants of conversations
Mode of discourse: the channel of communication
An illustration
Zhao Yan：Excuse me. I’d like some information on how to get into an American University.
Officer: Yes, of course. Well, first, you write and get an application form. Then, you send it with a copy of your school records and an affidavit of support. And after that, you ask your teachers for some letters of recommendation.
Zhao Yan: And do I need to take any tests?
Officer: yes, you have to take the TOEFL test for one, and for some schools I think you may also have to take the SAT
Zhao Yan: And is it all right to apply to several universities at the same time?
Officer: Oh, sure. No problem.
The field of discourse：information on how to get into an American university: writing to get an application form, sending it with a copy of school records, an affidavit of support, and some letters of recommendation, taking the TOEFL test and in some cases a SAT test, and the possibility to apply to several universities simultaneously.
The tenor of discourse：communication between a student and an officer in American Embassy
The mode of discourse：oral English
The nature of Halliday’s sociosemantics can be captured by the following table:
Phonology / graphology
Transitivity: the 6 processes
Mode-residue structure
Theme-rheme structure
Ideational meaning
Interpersonal meaning
Textual meaning
Field of discourse
Tenor of discourse
Mode of discourse
In the USA
Boas, Sapir and Whorf: the anthropological approach to the study of language which can still be felt when we talk about Ethnography of Communication. What is best remembered of American Anthropological linguistics is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:
Linguistic determinism: Language determines our way of thinking.
Linguistic relativity: similarity between languages is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be.
Basic color terms
In English and Chinese there are 11 basic color terms, but in some other languages there might be fewer basic color terms. The speakers of those languages which have different number of basic color terms may have different view on the color spectrum.
But A universal evolutionary process of basic color terms:
White < [red] < green < [blue] < [brown] < purple
black yellow pink
orange
gray
stage I II III IV V VI
But we do not have evidence from historical studies of different languages to support the hypothesis. In the same way, we do not have evidence to support the hypothesis that English and Chinese are at different developmental stages. English has been moving from a synthetic language to an analytic language, while Chinese is an analytic language. Some say that Chinese manifests more developmental maturity than English.
Conclusions about the hypothesis:
Some view the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as one of the greatest contributions made by scholars on language in the 20th century. But most people would say that language, culture and thought interact, each influencing and shaping the others.
But language does exert influence upon thought.
Case studies:
“Did you see a broken headlight?”
“Did you see the broken headlight?”
A flag: 一面旗 A river: 一条河 A pencil: 一支铅笔
Political oration, newspaper editorials, advertisements are meant to influence people’s thinking.
“If Aristotle had spoken Chinese his logic would have been different.”
Kinship terms.
Since there are more kinship term in Chinese, the Chinese people can talk about kinship relations relatively easily. This strengthens the Chinese people’s concept about kinship relations.
Honorifics and terms of humility
In English: Majesty, (most) Honorable, Excellency, and a small number of titles: president, mayor, professor, etc,
In Chinese: 您、令尊、高见、大作、贵府
敝人、拙荆、犬子、寒舍
This contrast may be related to the distinction between a stratified society and a mobile society
Linear vs spiral or cyclic text development
In English a paragraph or text may begin with the topic sentence. And the second sentence is derived from the first one. The third one is derived from the second one, and so on.
In Chinese the sentences in a paragraph or text may not have readily seen formal linkages between them. E.g. 君子曰：学不可以已。青取之于蓝，而青于蓝；冰，水为之，而寒于水。木直中绳，輮以为轮，其曲中规。虽有槁曝，不复挺者，輮使之然也。……
But it is dangerous to try to relate all structural characteristics to culture. Language has its own way of development.
“The Chinese language is monosyllabic and uninflectional … With a language so incapable of variation, a literature cannot be produced which possesses the qualities we look for and admire in literary works. Elegance, variety, beauty of imagery – these must all be lacking”
The subjunctive mood and counterfactual thinking.
Some scholars claim that since Chinese does not have formal markers for the subjunctive mood, the Chinese people are not capable of counterfactual thinking.
Culture in language classrooms
The teaching of two unknowns, the target language and the target culture, simultaneously.
The objectives:
1) To get the students familiar with cultural differences;
2) To help the students transcend their own culture and see things as the members of the target culture will;
3) To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and understanding culture through various classroom practice.
Language and society
Monistic or autonomous pursuit of an independent science: a separation of the structural study of language from its social context of usage.
Dualistic view of the linguistic inquiry: the study of language as it is used in society, as an opposition to the dominant theory of Chomskyan linguistics.
A situationally and socially variation perspective
The factors that are believed to influence language behavior in a social context include: 1) class, 2) gender, 3）age, 4) ethnic identity, 5) educational background, 6) occupation, and 7) religious belief.
William Labov in his The Social Stratification of English in New York City reported that class and style were two major factors influencing the speaker’s choice of one phonological variant over another. For instance, in the U.S.A.
Upper class Non-Upper class
’yesterday yester’day
Vase (bars) (maize)
’int’resting inte’resting
In vocabulary, the course of meal following the main course has different names for different social classes:
Pudding (upper and middle classes) Sweet (middle class) Dessert (lower middle class) afters (lower middle and lower classes) pudding (lower classes)
According to Lakoff, there exists a woman register in language that takes on the following features:
1) Women use more fancy color terms such as mauve (淡紫色) and beige（米色）.
2) Women use less powerful curse words.
3) Women use more intensifiers such as terrible and awful.
4) Women use more tag questions: He’s right, isn’t he?
5) Women use more statement (declarative) questions: He’s right?
6) Women’s linguistic behavior is more indirect and, hence, more polite than men: Could you lower your voice a little?
Linguistic sexism: linguistic discrimination against women: chairman, man power, man（used to refer to the whole human race）, he (used to refer to a person of unknown sex), gentlemen. If a man behaves strangely, one may say, “There’s a woman in it.” The proverb: Wives and children are bills of charges.
Linguistic racism: linguistic discrimination against some ethnic groups: niger, negro, the black people, Afro-Americans; Chinks, Japs, Dagos, kirks, Pommy, slant eyes. England will beat Argentina in the football match or I’m a Dutchman. Many of the boys at the school took French leave to go to the football match.
The relationship between language and society
This relationship can be studied from two different perspectives: the sociolinguistc study of society and the sociolinguistic study of language.
The sociolinguistc study of society
If we want to know more about a given society or community by examinng the linguistic behavior of its members, we are doing a macro sociolinguistic study of society. At this level of investigation we may be interested in the following things:
Bilingualism and multilingualism: referring firstly to a speech community which makes use of two or more languages and secondly to individuals who can speak two or more languages. Sociolinguists are particularly concerned with the social status of these languages and their role in identifying speakers with different ethnic groups. They may raise different kinds of political, educational and social problems, depending on the numbers, social standing and national feelings of the groups concerned.
Language planning: There might be different languages or dialects spoken in a country. So society needs a systematic attempt to solve the communication problem and develop a realistic policy concerning the proper selection and appropriate use of these languages and dialects. This kind of deliberate, official and collective activities is called language planning.
The standard language or dialect: When a country abounds with languages and dialects of a language, a prestige language or dialect will be accepted by society as the foundation of the standard language or dialect.
Language maintenance: When the younger generation of a subordinate language community do not feel the need of using that language or deliberately avoid the use of that language, the subordinate language will fall into disuse or die out in the course time. For this reason, efforts are sometimes made to keep the language from going out. This is called language maintenance
The sociolinguistic study of language
If we want to know more about some linguistic variations by turning to socialcultural factors for a description and explanation, we are doing a micro sociolinguistic study of language. For example,
Address forms: in English speaking countries, people get into first name terms every easily. Titles plus surnames are not used very often in interpersonal communication
Discourse analysis: the analysis of language units larger than sentences. For example, in a society people may get other people’s attention, nominate a topic, develop a topic, and terminate a topic in certain ways.
Pidgin: formed by two speech communities attempting to communicate, each successively approximating to the more obvious features of the other’s language. Pidgin languages are used for restricted purposes and are native languages of none.
Creole: When a Pidgin becomes the native language of a speech community, it changes into a Creole.
The implications from sociolinguistics for language teaching
Communicative competence
a. linguistic competence
N. Chomsky: the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language.
A set of (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
b. communicative competence
D. Hymes:
Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible.
Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible, in virtue of the means of implementation available.
Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to the context in which it is used and evaluated.
Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed, and what its doing entails.
M. Canale and M. Swain:
Grammatical competence
Sociolinguistic competence
Discourse competence
Strategic competence
a. Sociolinguistics has contributed to a change of emphasis in the content of language teaching.
b. It has also contributed to innova