英语语言学自编教材第九章

Chapter 9 Language and Culture 1．General Introduction
1.1 The Relationship between Language and Culture
●Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over
1) In the following two conversations, the second speaker responded
differently towards the same question. And what do you think a
Chinese speaker will answer the same question?
Conversation 1: between English speakers
A: I like your sweater!
B: Thank you!
Conversation 2: between an English speaker and a French
speaker.
A: I like your sweater!
B: Ah bon? Mais c’est très vieux ! (Oh, really? It’s very old!)
2) Look at the following English words. Is there some connection between these words?
bash, mash, smash, crash, dash, lash, clash, trash, splash, flash
☺ /ʃ/: this sound suggests a sudden, violent movement/action for
an English speaker
3) The following lines are taken from a Singapore film I Not Stupid. Can you draw a conclusion from what you have read about Singlish?
☺ Singlish/Singaporean: an English variety popular in Singapore
Mom: Selina, where is all the ang pow that you got for your
birthday?
Selina（Daughter）: That’s my money. Why I must give it to you
every time?
Terry（Son）: Yeah, lah. 为什么都要给你？
Mom: 我知道这是你们的钱，but I will help you save, invest, hah. Don’t worry. I will give it back to you when you are old enough.
Selina: When can you give it back to us?
Terry: I know. 55岁。

Mom: Terry，you think you very funny, is it? Stop talking nonsense. Ai, girl, do you really think it that ai suitable for your room, huh? Don’t you think that this is much nicer? See, ai, make of cane, na.
Selina: Mom, I thought you see that I can decorate my own room in any way I want? I want to try this one. I don’t like that one, that’s old-fashioned.
Mom: Yes, yes.
Selina: So can I do it in my own way, please?
Mom: I know. Whatever I say you won’t like it. But one day you will appreciate it. This is for your own good. Trust me, hah!
●Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn
Every language is inseparable from a culture; it has to serve and reflect cultural needs. People from different cultural background find themselves with different customs, such as the different responses to the same compliment in the above observation. Culture, on the other hand, is constantly conditioning language with time, take the Singaporean for example, they have covered a long way to shape in form their own language; and it is too rash for us to take it for granted that their language is simply a variety of the English language. Language expresses, embodies and symbolizes cultural reality (Claire Kramsch: 2000), which we can find good illustration in onomatopoeias. Can you find other examples to demonstrate the relationship between culture and language?
The word “culture”, in its origin, means to cultivate, which can be taken to refer to any human knowledge. Any language will be unintelligible once it is taken out of the appropriate cultural context. The following quote, from the linguist F. de Saussure’s book Course in General Linguistics, is an explanation of the relationship between culture and language.
F. de Saussure (1857-1913)—It is the social part of the language, external to the individual, who by himself is powerless either to create it or to modify it. It exists only in virtue of a kind of contract agreed between the members of a community.
●Definitions to Clarify
Speech community: That is composed of people who use the
same linguistic code;
Discourse communities: The common ways in which members of a social group use language to meet their social needs.
1.2 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
● Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over
1) While Whorf was working as a fire
insurance risk assessor, he noticed that the way
people behaved toward things was often
dangerously correlated to the way these things
were called. For example, the sight of the sign
“EMPTY”on empty gasoline drums would
prompt passersby to toss cigarette butts into these drums, not
realizing that the remaining gasoline fumes would be likely to
cause an explosion. In this case, the English sign “EMPTY” evoked a neutral space, free of danger.
2) As Chinese speakers learning English as a foreign language, it is not rare for the
teacher to catch them misusing “he” and “she” in oral English practice. In comparison, French speakers are used to attaching gender to most of the objects in their lives. For example, le chocolat (chocolat), la lettre (letter), le téléphone (telephone), la radio (radio).
What do you think is the possible reason for this phenomenon?
● Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn
In their study of American Indian languages, the American linguist Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf had hypothesized that language has a relatively strong impact on its speakers’ mode of thought. The strong version of
their hypothesis is named linguistic determinism. It posits that
language determines the way we think, or in other words, we actually
live in language instead of other way round. Today, it is generally
believed that the strong version denies our activity in learning to
understand people from different speech communities. For instance,
though it is true that the Chinese language doesn’t attach gender to its characters, it is definitely false to assume that Chinese-users are unable to adopt the French vocabulary with the correct gender attached to it. What’s more, most of the linguists refuted the strong version by claiming that if Sapir were right with his theory, then how could he successfully understand the native languages spoken by American
Indians？
The weak version that is generally accepted nowadays proposed that there are cultural differences in the semantic associations evoked by seemingly common concepts. For instance, a Chinese professor, in his speech on Chinese characters, once suggested that the character “笑” is related to a smiling face immediately while other foreign words, say, smile, sourire, わらう, can not. In Professor Claire Kramsch’s book, he noticed a German woman farmer who believed that the German language is
a much more natural and correct expression of one’s emotions or thoughts.
2. Cross-Cultural Communication
2.1 Meaning as Sign
●Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over
1) Please compare the following two groups of words:
A: laugh, smile, grin, giggle, beam
B: 大笑、微笑、咧开嘴笑、咯咯地笑、眉开眼笑
It is obvious that the Chinese language encodes the physical facial
expression through one sign—“笑”, but the English language adopts a richer vocabulary for the same expression. Different signs denote reality by cutting it up in different ways.
2) A: What is the Chinese equivalent for the English word “hell”?
B: 地狱，I think.
Question: Do you think that “hell” and “地狱”evoke the same associations in your mind? Do you think they share the same connotation?
3) Do you notice different onomatopoeias in different languages? What are the echoic words used in English and Chinese to refer to a loud sound made by a rooster?
4) Although it is believed that different languages predispose their speakers to view
reality in different ways through the different metaphors they use, more similarities can be found cross different languages.
a. ARGUMENT IS WAR.
b. 唇枪舌剑；舌战群儒
a. To think out of box.
b. 不落窠臼
a. A man never goes back upon his own word.
b. 大丈夫一言既出，驷马难追。

Question: Can you work out the similarity between the two expressions in the last example?
● Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn
Signs established between words and things various semantic relations of denotation, connotation, or iconicity that give general meaning to the world.
When a male chicken makes a loud sound, in English, it looks like this: cock-a-doodle-doo; in Chinese, it goes like this: 喔喔喔；
Words can be images (or icons) of the objects in nature. The interesting phenomenon is that although it is claimed that “a rose by any other names is also a rose,” the sound in nature is not represented by the same onomatopoeia through different languages.
It is obvious that in the above two examples, both the English and Chinese language share the same metaphorical mode of thought when referring to argument. Argument is, therefore, easily attached to the concept of war.
The linguists Lakoff and Johnson suggest that if we can imagine a culture in which arguments are not compared to war, but to dance, what will be the difference in their attitudes towards argument? Does this suggest that members of this fictitious culture never argue?
In the last metaphor about keeping one’s word, it is interesting for us to observe that both the English language and Chinese language suggest that once a promise is made, it will keep a distance from its maker.
Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature.
● Definitions to Clarify
icon: image, picture or representation.
Sign: a linguistic unit; it unites a concept and a sound-image.
Metaphor: a device for seeing something in terms of something else.
2.2 Cultural Clash
● Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over
1) After the translation of the book of Mr. Shen Xiaolong (申小龙)—
《差异与视角：“西有汉无”与“西死汉活”》，the translator had asked
for comment from the American scholar Eugene A. Nida on the
English version. The following are some examples from their
correspondence.
A.
Original：人类各种语言都是以形式和意义相结合的方式来表达思想的。

English Version：Every human language expresses ideas by combining form and meaning.
Nida’s Comment：Why would a writer want to specify “human” with language? There are no other verbal languages except those produced by people.
B.
Original：这样照搬西方语言学来作汉语的形式分析，其结果就是貌合神离，也就是我们语法学所说的汉语语法之貌（形式），不合于汉语语法之神
（意义）。

English Version：If we analyze Chinese with grammatical theory indiscriminately copied from Western linguistics, it is apparently in harmony but actually
at variance. That is, the appearance of Chinese grammatical theories
presented by modern Chinese linguists (form) does not accord with the
spirit of Chinese sentence structure (meaning).
Nida’s Comment: It would be important to indicate “variance with what”. The statement “does not accord with the spirit of Chinese sentence structure
(meaning)” is very confusing and no doubt so in the original. Question: Despite the rather “fierce” response from Nida, Can you understand these Chinese sentences? Are they really so high-flown and philosophical as Nida put it? Or is it simply an illustration of cultural clash?
2) There are two groups of students in this linguistic experiment: one from China and the other from Latin America. They are competent in using daily English. This is a charade game, and there are two totally different communicating strategies involved by different groups.
Target word：Drink (Chinese students)
Sender: It’s a verb. You put down water into your mouth.
Receiver: Drink
（Latin American students）
Sender: It’s something every house uses in the morning.
Receiver: Clean the house?
S: No.
R: Make breakfast?
S: No. In America, all house use in the morning.
R: Tea?
S: …
R: Go to the bathroom?
S: No. O.K., every people use in the morning.
R: Use in the morning?
What is the difference that you observe in the example?
(Note: The above quotations are exactly the record of the utterance, so are the grammatical errors in them.)
● Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn
The ability to adopt a language is one to signal one’s membership in a socially meaningful discourse community. Linguist James Gee prefers “Discourse” with a capital “D”. “discourse” (for connect ed stretches of language that make sense, like conversations, stories, reports, argume nts, essays) is part of “Dis course” (which is always more than just language).
To an outsider of a discourse community, however, an utterance is not a mere statement of fact. In order to understand the full meaning of an utterance, a profound knowledge of both situational and cultural context should be informed or acquired. That is why Nida, an expertise translator, failed to read sense into the English version (This version is translated by professors from the Beijing Foreign Studies University.) of Shen Xiaolong’s work.
From the observation of the charade game, it is concluded that the Chinese group relies more on linguistic descriptions to explain a word to each other while the Latin American group adopts non-linguistic descriptions with a higher frequency. Another example is that during an English writing test in a high-school in USA, a student from China successfully avoided major grammatical errors in his writing but failed to score higher than another student from Mexico, whose composition is full of grammatical errors but better in telling his personal story; and the most satirical part is that the Mexican student had succeeded finding a job because of the composition but the Chinese had great difficulty landing himself a position in USA.
There may be no right or wrong in describing different communicative strategies, but they can be termed effective or ineffective, especially when cross-cultural communication or cultural clash is unavoidable.
The following question is for you to ponder over: How to define the term “cultural clash”? Do you have any example to prove that cultural clash is happening every day?
● Definitions to Clarify
Discourse: This term, with a capital D, coined by linguist James Gee, refers to ways of speaking, reading and writing, but also of behaving, interacting, thinking, valuing, that are characteristic of specific discourse communities.
discourse: The process of language use, whether it be spoken, written or printed, that includes writers, texts, and readers within a sociocultural context of meaning production and reception.
Charades：Charades is a fun game to play with your friends and family at home, at parties or on camping trips! Charades are basically words or phrases that are acted out in pantomime (without saying any words or making any sounds). Charades can also have subjects like the title of a book, movie or show that is acted out. Charades are usually played with two teams. Each team draws cards that have the word or phrase they are going to act out. The other team tries to guess what is being acted out.
2.3 Stereotype
● Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over
1) In the year of 1933, 1951 and 1967, the students of Princeton
University, USA, had taken a series of linguistic experiments to
determine their impressions on certain cultural groups, and the
following form is the result of these experiments.
2) Le Page and Tabouret-Keller recount the case of a man in Singapore who claimed that he would never have any difficulty in telling the difference between an Indian and a Chinese.
But how would he instantly know that the dark-skinned non-Malay person he saw on the street was an Indian (and not, say, a Pakistani), and that the light-skinned non-European was a Chinese (and not, say, a Korean), unless he differentiated the two accordi ng to the official Singaporean “ethnic”categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, others?
In another context with different racial classifications he might have interpreted differently the visual clues presented to him by people on the street. His impression was focused by the classificatory concepts prevalent in his society, a behavior that Benjamin Whorf would have predicted.
In turn this focus may prompt him, by a phenomenon of diffusion, to identify all other “Chinese”along the same ethnic categorie s, according to the stereotype “All Chinese look alike to me” (Claire Kramsch: 2000:68).
● Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn
Coined in 1922 by the American journalist, Walter Lippmann, the word “stereotype” is the shortcut for us to get the first brief of a foreign nation or ethnic, but is also, the most convenient dead end for us to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the nation or ethnic. A quick judgment, no matter how important the source is, is never the correct means to be acquainted with a knowledge concerning a culture. Think about this: in China, how many of us still greet each other “吃过饭了吗？” every day on the street? Especially among the youngsters born after the year of 1980? Another question is: Do every Chinese citizen know how to play Chinese Kongfu despite the so-called Kongfu Heat along with the Hong Kong action movies?
The first observation in this section focuses on a questionnaire survey in USA, and the second example is a quote from a common Singaporean, from both of which it is quite obvious that no one of us can easily and safely escape the trap of stereotype towards other nations or races, and the real question is: have you ever found yourself in the same trap when you are facing certain people from a different cultural background?
It’s time for us to ponder over the issue of stereotype: Is this concept a positive or negative, or rather, a neutral term? What is the use of this concept, if there is any? Why do linguists describe this term as a dilemma that no any study of culture can get out of it? Is it true that every one of us have to base our first impression of people from different cultural background on certain stereotypes?
● Definitions to Clarify:
Stereotype: Conventionalized ways of talking and thinking about other people and cultures.
Exercises
1.Define or explain the following terms:
1)culture
2)linguistic determinism
3)denotation
4)connotation
5)iconicity
6)cultural clash
2.Draw on your own knowledge of both the English and Chinese language and try
to pin down some metaphors that either share the same metaphorical mode of thought, or differentiate from each other sharply.
3.Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in your own words and give your comments
and your own observations.
4.Try to compare the two terms: linguistic determinism and cultural determinism.
5.If you have noticed the phenomenon that more and more “neutral”terms have
entered the English vocabulary, such as “spokesperson”, “chairperson”, or that sentences like “Everyone has to do their job properly”have become more and more common, can you explain this in your own words, referring to the relationship between culture and language?
Further Readings
Kramsch, Claire. Language and Culture. 上海: 上海外语教育出版社. 2000.
胡文仲. 跨文化交际面面观. 北京:外语教学与研究出版社. 1999.
11。