Sociolinguistics_Language_culture_and_society

Language, culture and society
1 What is culture?
1.1 High culture, low culture and nobrow culture
- High Culture is usually associated with those that are refined, educated, and/or wealthy (the elite). "best of breed" (from an elitist viewpoint) cultural products. What falls in this category is defined by the most powerful sections of society, i.e. its social, political, economic and intellectual elite.
- Opera, classical music, classic literature, etc.
- Low Culture is associated with the common people, those less educated and poor. It is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture.
- Kitsch, slapstick, camp, escapist fiction, popular music, tattoo art are examples of low culture. - Slapstick is a type of comedy involving exaggerated physical violence or activities (e.g., a character being hit in the face with a frying pan or running full speed into a wall). The style is common to those genres of entertainment in which the audience is supposed to understand the very hyperbolic nature of such violence to exceed the boundaries of common sense and thus license non-cruel laughter;
- Kitsch /kɪtʃ/ is a term of German or Yiddish origin that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass. (媚俗, 自媚, 刻奇);
- Camp is an aesthetic in which something has appeal because of its bad taste or ironic value. When term first appeared in 1909, it was used to refer to ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, effeminate or homosexual behavior. By the mid-1970s, the term was defined as "banality, artifice, mediocrity, or ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal."
- Escapist fiction is fiction which provides a psychological escape from thoughts of everyday life by immersing the reader in exotic situations or activities.
- The boundary between high culture and low culture has blurred.
- Nobrow culture is a postmodern neologism derived from highbrow and lowbrow coined by John Seabrook. The term denotes intellectual discourse which is influenced both by high culture and low culture. The term can also be applied to cultural products which are both a critical and box office success.
1.2 Culture in a broad sense
It means the total way of life of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language.
- System of cultural abstractions
- abstractions refers to a particular set of ideational concepts including values, morals, ethics, conceptions of right and wrong, conceptions of justice and laws, rituals, spiritual and religious beliefs, and ideas that in themselves have no concrete or material reality (e.g., honesty,
responsibility, kindness).
- This system influences and shapes cognitive possibilities and structures the range of choices that are most likely within a culture.
- System of cultural Artifacts
-this system includes products of the culture’s participants, such as fine and plastic arts, crafts, photography, music, dance, clothing and jewelry, architecture and design, furnishings, material objects such as tools and computers, and so forth.
- Cultural artifacts express their particular cultural frameworks and sometimes rebel against them.
e.g., Color: black is associated with mourning in the Christian and Judaic traditions, but white
symbolizes mourning in China.
Rock-and-roll as rebellion against mainstream culture
- System of Cultural language and communication
- This system is the central resource used by human beings to create, maintain, and change culture. Languages encode cultures according to the ways in which they are structured through rules for use. Thus, cultures all have their particular discourse patterns, which convey different worldviews.
2The relationship between Language & Culture
2.1.1 Two opposing views
Language is vehicle
- Language is essentially a vehicle for transporting information and ideas;
- Language is seen primarily for its role in transmitting the culture;
- The transmission metaphor became especially powerful due to the development of science and technology.
Language is formative
- Language is symbolic action that creates the substance of culture;
- People use language to create situations and indicate those things that become regarded as important, significant (language both symbolize and create culture);
Universal and Situated Culture
Universal Situated
Reality is independent of specific cultures Humans operate through one system of rationality, which can be perfected to perceive the truth
Culture resides in abstract knowledge systems found in people’s heads
Language is a vehicle Reality is relative to specific cultures Humans operate through many different systems of rationality, perceiving different truths
Culture resides in human action, manifested in human processes and products
Language is symbolic action
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941)
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. …a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar …”
Linguistic determinism: L may determine our thinking patterns.
Linguistic relativity: different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around.
Linguistic evidence of cultural differences
The Eskimos have countless words for snow, the Arabs, for camels.
A number of Chinese idioms are related with agricultural activities:
烫手的山芋vs. hot potato
雨后春笋vs. spring like mushroom
大鱼大肉、鱼肉百姓、酒肉朋友meat and potatoes, meat and drink to someone
杀鸡取卵kill the goose that lays the golden eggs
Kinship systems
Greetings
Thanks and compliments
Privacy and taboos
Color words:
Berlin & Kay’ study:
Black, white<red<yellow, green<blue, brown
1) The color spectrum is an objective physical continuum, waiting to be dealt with cognitively;
2) Human cognition is so alike everywhere that everyone approaches the spectrum in the same way. Color identification is not arbitrary but pattern-based, as shown by the above hierarchy.
Relativity in Riding
English: Riding covers horses and bicycles, but not cars
German: Fahren covers bicycles and cars, but not horses
Relativity in grammar
grammar of nouns:
English: countability, number (1 or many?)
Russian and French: sex
Chinese: shape (etc)
Chinese: yi-ge (1 person, book) –yi-tiao (1 fish, river)
Relativity in space
Spatial relations:
English: North – South (absolute); left – right (relative)
Edinburgh is north of London.
The screen is to the left of Dick.
Guugu Yimithir (Australia): North - South
Linguistic determinism
- Languages certainly express different analyses of the world.
- Therefore when speaking, different languages make us analyse the world differently.
- But do different languages make us think differently when we are not speaking?
e.g.,
Food Classification
- Chinese
- Warm food vs. cool food
- It is not the actual temperature of the food, but rather the nature of the food that produces a cool or warm effect on one’s body;
- A balanced diet means to make a balance between heat and cool food;
- English
- A balanced diet means to make a balance between four main food groups: fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry, breads and grains, and dairy products.
Shape or color?
- Navajo (USA)
Verb morphology shows the shape of the object.
Card-sorting task with children on a reservation:
The children had the same environment but different languages.
- English speakers favored color (like babies)
Navajo speakers paid more attention to shape
So language does influence non-linguistic thought
But toy-rich children in Boston favored shape.
- So language is just one influence.
- So, does language influence thought?
Yes, it certainly influences ‘thinking for speaking’.
Yes, it has some influence on non-linguistic thinking.
- Shared ‘thought-patterns’are the ‘culture’ of our society.
- We learn our language from our society. So language teaches us our society’s culture.
- The structure of our language is closely linked to the structure of our culture.。