胡壮麟-语言学教程修订版-课堂笔记和讲义精选Chapter--(7).doc

Chapter 7 Language, Culture and Society [The textbook form of this chapter seems very twisted for me. So I changed the structure of the notes, using some questions to guide the whole chapter. – icywarmtea]7.1 Language and culture 1. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesisWhat the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests is like this: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. Following this argument, two important points could be captured in the theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the other hand, similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. For this reason, this hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. This hypothesis has two versions: a strong and a weak version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical. 2. Context of situation (1) The relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities: a. The verbal action of the participants b. The non-verbal action of the participants (2) The relevant objects (3) The effects of the verbal action3. Speech community: Speech community refers to a group of people who form a community, e.g. a village, a region, a nation, and who have at least one speech variety in common.4. Gender difference: Gender difference is the difference in a speech between men and women.5. Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity: Linguistic determinism is one of the two points in S-W hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought. Linguistic relativity is the other point: there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages.6. Ethnography of communication: The study of place of language in culture and society. Language is not studied in isolation but within a social or cultural setting. Ethnography of communication studies, e.g. how people in a particular group or community communicate with each other and how the social relationships between these people affect the type of language they use.7. Cross-cultural communication: An exchange of ideas, information, etc. between persons from different cultural backgrounds.8. What are the aims of teaching culture in language class? There are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our class: (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 culture through various classroom practices.All this lead to a belief that a good understanding of structural things in some cases has much to do with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language from language learners. In other words, a successful master of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture, because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure.7.2 Language and society1. How many social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context?The following social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context: (1) Class; (2) Gender; (3) Age; (4) Ethnic identity; (5) Education background; (6) Occupation; (7) Religious belief.2. What are the sociolinguistic study of society and the sociolinguistic study of language>If we want to know more about a given society or community by examining the linguistic behavior of its members, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of society. That is to say, we are doing sociolinguistics at a macro level of investigation. At this level of discussion things that we are interested in include bilingualism or multilingualism, language attitude, language choice, language maintenance and shift, language planning and standardization, vernacular language education, etc.On the other hand, if we want to know more about some linguistic variations in language use by turning to potential socio-cultural factors for a description and explanation, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of language. Consequently, we are more interested in examining micro linguistic phenomena such as structural variants, address forms, gender differences, discourse analysis, Pidgin and Creole languages, and other more language-related issues. 3. What are vernacular, Pidgin and Creole?Vernacular refers to the 。