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1、Chapter 7Language, Culture and SocietyLectured byYuan Xiu-feng Faculty of Foreign Languages Shaoxing University E-mail: Tel.: 0575-88341881 7.1 Language and culture7.1.1 What is culture? Culture, in a broad sense, means the total way of life of a nation, including the patterns of belief, customs, ob
2、jects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. As culture is so inclusive, it permeates virtually every aspect of human life and influences predominantly peoples behavior, including linguistic behavior. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local
3、or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc. Generally speaking, there are two types of culture: material and spiritual. While material culture, as the term itself suggests, is concrete, substantial and observable, most
4、of spiritual culture, the products of mind (ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space, for example), is abstract, ambiguous, and hidden. In contrast with nature in the sense of what is born and grows, culture refers to what has been grown and brought up with, in other words, what ca
5、n be nurtured. Culture, especially material culture, is reproduced and preserved through the maintaining of beliefs, traditions, education and other institutional mechanisms, meanwhile, it changes slowly with the development of the society.7.1.2 How is language related to culture? When we learn a ne
6、w word we tend to look for its meaning in the word itself. Yet in addition to its dictionary meanings, the same word may stir up different associations in people. Take the word dog for example. From the above, we can infer that language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events which represent simi
7、lar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the peoples attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks, etc. in a word, language expresses cultural reality. When a child acquires his mother tongue, he also acquires a language-specific culture and becomes socialized in certain ways. If he moves to anoth
8、er community or country, he may be recognized easily not as a member of the local community but as a newcomer from the ways he uses his language. This implies that language embodies cultural identity. To dig it further, a language, as a system of signs with their own cultural substances and values,
9、may be viewed as a symbol of society identity. People are identified via their use of language. In this sense, language symbolizes cultural reality. On the other hand, as peoples language uses express the culture, to be more specific, their community culture represented by its social conventions, no
10、rms and social appropriateness, the culture both emancipates and constrains people socially, historically and metaphorically. Sharing a same community culture, people have acquired common ways of viewing the world through their speech interactions with other members of the same group. While the comm
11、onness is constantly reinforced, the discourse community converges. The uniqueness of each groups language uses in grammatical, lexical, and phonological aspects etc., the ways they talk and the style with which they talk, etc. constitute different discourse accents. Different discourse accents sugg
12、est different social status. For example, people in the West End in London speak differently from the East Enders. Historically, each culture has its past and tradition, to put it simply, the culture of everyday practices has been evolved and become consolidated over time. A culture consists both of
13、 its ways how a social group represents itself, its technological achievements, monuments and works of art and of its historical identity recorded and passed down by the pop culture. These altogether constitute its social identity. For example, on the mentioning of the United States, people may ofte
14、n think of its advanced computer technology represented by the Microsoft, its pop songs and the Hollywood movies. However, its culture would be incomplete without the Declaration of Independence and other historic events. It is language that has played a major role in socializing the people and in p
15、erpetuating culture, especially in print from. In addition, culture also affects its peoples imagination or common dreams which are mediated through the language and reflected in their life. They serve a metaphor for its cultural reality. The Well-known American Dream personified by Abraham Lincoln
16、and Benjamin Franklin and others is just an illustration, therefore, language is not only intrinsically related to what the culture is and what it was, but also related to the culture of imagination governing peoples decisions as well as actions. The interplay between language and culture may result
17、 in various forms of socialization. Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. Linguistic competence is one variety of cultural competence and speech behaviour is one variety of social behaviour, the relation of language to culture is that of part to whole. To sum up
18、, since the knowledge and beliefs that constitute a peoples culture are habitually encoded and transmitted in the language of the people, it is extremely difficult to separate the two. On the one hand, language as an integral part of human being, permeates his thinking and way of viewing the world,
19、language both expresses and embodies cultural reality. On the other hand, language, as a product of culture, helps perpetuate the culture, and the changes in language uses reflect the cultural changes in return.7.1.3 Sapir Whorf Hypothesis(沃尔夫假说1956) （萨丕尔沃尔夫假说）(Whorfian hypothesis（沃尔夫假说）) In the dis
20、cussion about the relationship between language and culture, one of the essential issues is that between language and thought. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, through their studies of American Indian languages, proclaimed that the structure of the language people habitually use influences the ways
21、they think and behave. That is to say, different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around, they think and speak differently, this is also known as linguistic relativity（语言相关性） (one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is a belief strongly put forward by the Ame
22、rican anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf. It holds that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language.). Sapir and Whorf believe that language filters peoples perception and the way they categorize experience. This interdependence of la
23、nguage and thought is now known as Sapir-Whorf hypotheses (SWH). Since its formulation, the hypothesis was subject to fierce controversy and scorn. Until recently with the revival interest in this issue, it regains peoples attention. The hypothesis is now interpreted mainly in two different ways: a
24、strong version and a weak version. While the strong version believes that the language patterns determine peoples thinking and behavior (linguistic determinism: one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought.), the weak one holds that the former influences the latt
25、er. So far, many researchers and experiments conducted in various disciplines provide support to the weak version. The studies have shed new light on our understanding of the hypotheses: people tend to sort out and distinguish experiences differently according to the semantic categories provided by
26、their different codes. Here is an example. English-speaking culture teaches its people to name what is practical, useful and important. In a general sense, the important things take on specific names while the less important things have general names that must be modified through additional words to
27、 become specific. A good illustration of this point is the word “snow” in Eskimo and English. The Eskimos have countless words for snow. For them snow is extremely important and so crucial to life that each of its various forms and conditions is named. In English-speaking cultures, snow is far less
28、important and the simple word “snow” usually suffices the needs. When some needs become more specific, however, longer phrases can be made up to meet these needs: “corn snow, “fine powder snow”, and “drifting snow”. Once again this proves that there is a connection between the words a culture select
29、s and the ideas and things of that culture. In short, each culture presents to its members, either consciously or subconsciously through words, the ideas and concepts that culture transmits from generation to generation. To conclude this section, the study of the linguistic relativity or SWH has she
30、d two important insights: (1)There is nowadays a recognition that language, as code, reflects cultural preoccupations and constrains the way people think. (2)More than in Whorfs days, however, we recognize how important context is in complementing the meanings encoded in the language. Arguments agai
31、nst the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis1.Words and meaning2. Grammatical structure3. Translation4. Second language acquisition5. Language and world views 7.1.4 Linguistic evidence of cultural differencesAny linguistic sign may be simultaneously of a denotative, connotative, or iconic kind of meanings. To beg
32、in with, any sign has a meaning that can be found in a dictionary, this is the denotative meaning. E.g. “rose” is a flower that has a pleasant smell and is usually red, white, or yellow etc. On most occasions “rose” means more than a flower, it also triggers many associations mostly good ones such a
33、s love, fragrance, passion and beauty etc. These are its connotations or connotative meanings. Moreover, the word “rose” also invokes image (or icon) to people. The famous line “My love is a red, red rose” stirs up vividly the imagination of a beautiful young lady. This is the iconic meaning. Many p
34、eople or literary works use heavily the words filled with iconic meanings.All these types of meanings are bound with cultural encodings or associations, for the meanings of words cannot be separated from their associations. Each language has its own metaphors that provide semantic cohesion within it
35、s boundaries. Motivated by the need and desire to influence others, people choose to use words which emphasize denotative meaning, connotative meaning or iconic meanings or all of them, during the same process its cultural meanings are created.1.Greetings and terms of address 2.Thanks and compliment
36、s3.Privacy and taboos4.Cultural-related idioms, proverbs and metaphors5.Body language 7.1.5 Culture in language teaching classroom7.2 Language and society7.2.1 Definition of sociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the sub-field of linguistics that studies the relation between language and society, betwe
37、en the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. 7.2.2 The inter-relationship between language and society0 IntroductionThere was an extreme opinion held by Noam Chomsky: “There is no relationship between linguistic structure and social structure; each is indepe
38、ndent of the other. Fortunately enough, the famous linguist himself changed his opinion in his later years. Nevertheless, there exist two clear-cut arguments with their respective representative linguists: one is that language determines social behaviour (Whorf, 1956); the other is that language is
39、the reflection of society (Labov,1972; Trudgill,1983) or social functions and situations determine language (J. Gumperz & J. Fishman,1971). German linguist, N. Dittamar (1973) believes that language and social behaviour interact with each other. This is the compromise of the above-mentioned argument
40、s. And this is what we support. The paper attempts to analyze the interaction between language and society in the following two dimensions. 1 The effect of society on languageSaussure, one of the principal founders of modern linguistics, once pointed out: “Language is a living phenomenon and should
41、be firmly put in its social milieu.” The statement soundly confirms that society plays an important role in the development of language, for language is subject to social changes and needs. According to micro-linguistics, a language contains three basic elements: sound, grammar and vocabulary, which
42、 macro-linguistics puts them phonology, syntax and semantics. Society affects each of them. 1.1 Physical environment has an effect on language Arbitrariness, one of the design features of the language, illustrates that the connection between the form and meaning of linguistic signs is established by
43、 convention. In other words, people name a thing only when there is something existing in the world or in the imaginary world. Eskimos have more than 100 terms for the word “snow” with different degrees and forms. Similarly in English there is a whole host of terms for different kinds of dog: hound,
44、 mastiff, spaniel, terrier, poodle, and each will call up different images. Different languages have different forms for the same thing, e.g. Bark is used in English to express the meaning of the sharp and loud sound made by a dog, whereas in Chinese, we use wang for the same meaning. 1.2 Social str
45、ucture may affect language.Families are cells of a society. Family relationships clearly demonstrate the influence of social structure on the language. As far as Chinese kinship terms are concerned, they are getting increasingly simpler than before. Traditionally, Chinese families used to be very bi
46、g, with different generations living together. Consequently, the relationships were very complex, with various kinship terms. Thanks to the one-child policy, there appear nuclear families, that is to say, families are becoming smaller and smaller, leading to the simplicity of family relationships, w
47、hich naturally influence the number of terms used to address family members. As a result, many terms will lose in the near future, especially in the cities, e.g. 连襟，妯娌，舅舅etc. 1.3 Social change can produce a linguistic change.Firstly, phonology changes with the social background. Everyone knows that
48、there is a variety of English which evolved from British English. They are American English, Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English etc., each having a subtle difference in phonology from British English. However, each of them came into being with the territorial expansion of the
49、British Empire. The model of British English plus locality have shaped the respective English. Hence, English develops into a large family. Secondly, syntax is subject to social changes. It is a tendency that English develops in its grammatical forms and syntactic structure from complexity to simpli
50、city. Like French, old English is also a language with the end inflection. However, modern English has lost many forms of inflection. In 1976, English Language Teaching mentioned that there is a trend of syntactic switch to frontal position in English syntax. Simeon Potter points out in Changing Eng