language, culture and society topics

language, culture and society topics

Trained in linguistics and anthropology, her work focuses on theories of culture and social change, on pidgins and creoles, and on linguistic representation of cultural knowledge. 1989. Creole language library. Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the end product of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. Proponents of the non-importance of language differences have repeatedly taken the relativity model of the Boasians to be the essentialist model and have criticized it on that basis, as linguistic relativism or determinism. Hindouisme: anthropologie dune civilization. (Lucy 1997a: 328) There could, of course, be a semantic basis for the morphological distribution observed, although one is obliged to view with suspicion Lucys confident claim that such a semantic basis exists since he is either unwilling or unable to reveal its nature. . The location of culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. r none of the other 121 stimulus terms was responded to with one of these four terms. Montreal: UQAM, Groupe de recherche sur le creole hatien. Choi, Soonja, Laraine McDonough, Melissa Bowerman, and Jean Mandler. Phonological systems are elaborate dances that every human speaker and listener has to master and which usually determine habitual ways of producing and receiving speech sounds. Questions that might illuminate grammatical development include: how does code switching change over developmental time? Althusser, Louis. New York: Basic Books. Introduction1. By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the mind; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense. While there are numerous sociolinguistic studies of school-age childrens code switching behavior (Auer 1988; Genishi 1981; McClure, 1977; Zentella 1990, 1997), there are no studies of the acquisition processes that lead to this competence in later life. 2 and 3. 1996. Metaphors we live by. show that a difference in the precise placement of the green/yellow boundary of English and the comparable boundary in Berinmo affects memory and similarity judgments of speakers of the two languages supporting tenet (1), but they present no data that show the terminology system of Berinmo to be arranged other than around the basic universal focal colors black, white, red, yellow, green and blue; hence, their data do not support tenet (2). Does understanding the means of gender (and sexual) conveyance helps us understand the relationship between gender Intimate grammars 197 (and sexuality), subjectivity, and language? but how would the agent itself know? How is your generation different from your parents' generation? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marxs father had converted to Lutheranism, and he himself was of course a devout atheist, but he was always identified as a Jew; Steinthal was a pillar of the Jewish community. Historical linguistics. The cultural milieu of childrens code of choice Thus far we have focused on the impact of culture on the acquisition of one particular language and have not attended to acquisition of more than one language in linguistically heterogeneous communities. . Method and morality. In Norma Haan et al. First, they lived in a world of spirits, both good and bad. The sets of remarks I present below seek to contribute to a further understanding of the link between these conditions and forms of contact and PC genesis. Norwood NJ: Ablex. While such exceptions were instantiated elsewhere in Gallo-Romance word histories, that was not good enough for Paris when a perfectly regular alternative was on the table: phonetic regularity must be accorded priority over semantic plausibility (Paris 1909: 618626; cp. *Pat is probable/improbable to win. 1994. There is clearly some difference in lexical meaning here which prompts the differential treatment. The latters natural signs were things like cries of pain or distress. [. Malotki, Ekkehart. . Such ethnographic poetry can take off from the poems of a distant tradition, but can also be inspired by other aspects of remote cultures, including archaeological ruins as in the following by Gary Snyder on cliffdwellers in the Southwest:1 anasazi Anasazi, Anasazi, tucked up in clefts in the cliffs growing strict fields of corn and beans sinking deeper and deeper in earth up to your hips in Gods your head all turned to eagle-down & lightning for knees and elbows your eyes full of pollen the smell of bats. After all, is not language a social phenomenon as much as a linguistic one? Rethinking Language and Gender Research, Theory and Practice. 2000. In the absence of sufficiently robust cognate Interpreting language variation and change 251 sets, strong parallels in morphological paradigms, and supporting data from written texts, archaeology, etc., the regular etymological approach cannot be used, or, to be more precise, does not yield the sort of results that would encourage traditionally trained linguists to continue their inquiry. Language and perception. The Boasians rejected the evolutionist package on every level: they held that each language deserves to be treated on its own terms, that the specifics of each language are important, and that each linguistic system orients the habitual thought of its users. Boas held that the ethnologist as linguist was responsible for recording the greatest possible detail of languages which were rapidly disappearing, while it was still possible to do so. It is possible that preceding or accompanying the familiar evolution of basic color term systems, there may be an evolution toward basic color term systems. Gumperz and Levinson 1996: 14, n. 2); the earliest appearance I have seen is Otto Friedrich Gruppes the necessary relativity of the whole of language (die notwendige Relativitat der ganzen Sprache) (Gruppe 1831 [1914]: 425; my translation). (4) For the above reason, among others, natural-science-like, desubjectivized models of variation and change must be complemented by hermeneutic approaches, which draw upon knowledge of various elements of the context of the phenomenon under study, as well as the investigators own instincts and imaginative capabilities as socially, historically, and culturally situated actors. Thus we have France debating already at the time of the Revolution how best to construct a unified France in which all could equally benefit from the values of the Revolution, that is, through bringing the message to the people through their own language varieties (whether Breton or Gascon, Picard or Occitan) or by assuring that everyone spoke the same language (Grillo 1989; Higonnet 1980). Travaux de recherche sur le creole hatien. Without any doubt. Intentions, then, were not imputed to these early unintelligible utterances nor did they elicit a communicative response from the caregivers in most instances. In a development of this idea, Friedrichs brother August (1818) came to distinguish the inflectional morphology typical of Indo-European languages from the isolating morphology of Chinese and the agglutinating morphology of many Old World languages, including Turkish. 1977. 2. Ann Arbor: Karoma. For their part, pidgin and creole (PCs for short) studies remained for a long time peripheral to the questions that were central to modern linguistics particularly in its generative incarnation. These theories, as we saw, recognize the creative role of expression. Such questions have stirred an enormous amount of speculation, controversy, and research across a number of fields: especially philosophy, logic, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. we havent done much if we do not [ . 1957. Culture is the sets, associations and cybernetic 220 Paul Friedrich networks of patterns, regularities, symbols and values (and ideas about them), behavioral, linguistic, and ideological, explicit and implicit, rational and emotional, conscious, unconscious and subconscious, that are differentially shared, transmitted in history, and created (or recreated) by the members, as individual agents or collectively, of a given society situated in concrete time and space (compare Kluckhohn and Kelly 1945). (ed.). Culture in mind: cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. (1956 [1940]) In this and many other passages, Whorf appeared to endorse both tenets: (1) linguistic categories structure experience and (2) linguistic categories are arbitrary social conventions although in other places he more or less explicitly disavowed (2).1 In any case, linguistic relativists following Whorf have assumed tacitly that there are no interesting universal constraints on the substance of linguistic categories. London: Longman. Buridant, Claude. What do you think is more important? . He delineates two grand perspectives on human nature, the one universalist, seeking natural-scientific laws to account for the important features of cognition; the other pluralistic and essentialist, inspired by Romanticism and the human sciences, according to which each language (and culture) has its own essence and indwelling principle that cannot be classified into any general category, any more than a human being or a human face (W. v. Humboldt Von dem grammatischen Baue der Sprachen, translated by Leavitt). Linteret particulier de la demographie pour le fait francais au Canada. In Jurgen Erfurt (ed. And, insofar as they are, they can be regimented into new discursive forms. 1995. . Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Discuss cultural bias in relation to specific cultural identities. Etymologische forschungen auf dem gebiete der indogermanischen sprachen, mit besonderem bezug auf die lautumwandlung im sanskrit, griechischen, lateinischen, littauischen und gothischen. Since conversation and similar use of natural language always has a poetic aspect, it follows that the research under the rubric of pragmatics and discourse also intersects with the ethnopoetic project, from Tannens analytical versions of a Thanksgiving repast to Beckers chapter-length philology of a Malay sentence both of which suggest the linguistic music, respectively, of a pleasant dinner-time dialogue and a beautiful sentence. It is probable/improbable that Pat will win. The words under study are broken up into their component parts (phonemes), and the relations among them (phonological context). Selectivity and early infant vocalization. In J. T. Enns (ed. 1990), including neo-Vygotskian studies of practical knowledge (Lave 1988; Suchman 1987; Rogoff and Lave 1984) and the related cultural psychology studies of Cole and Scribner (1974, 1977; Scribner and Cole 1981). This imperative form of the verb appeared prevalently in childrens speech from nineteen months of age on (Platt 1986; Ochs 1988). The structural transformation of the public sphere, an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. This collaboration must have taken different forms, and probably worked at various levels. Shatz, M. 1983. Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion. Nouns and particles refer to intrinsic color, specific to a substance or object, and are unchanging. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Phonetics and phonology represent unavoidable sound-worlds. At one extreme is the total commitment to aesthetic form, to the beauty of language and the music of language. Language is helping to shape us here. Lucy argues that there is a fundamental semantic difference between Yukatek and English nouns: Yukatek common nouns are semantically unspecified for quantificational unit, as if they all referred to substances. See Morissey (1989) and Moitt (2001) for a study of gender stratifications in Caribbean plantations. These are doctrines to the effect that X can only take place in the context of Y. Heidegger gives us an epochmaking one, where X is the contemplative grasp of things as vorhanden and Y is our being in the world as engaged agents, dealing with the zuhanden. To what degree workers interacted with workers of neighboring plantations is still a matter of speculation for many plantation settings, particularly for the early period of the plantation system, about which much historical work still needs to be done. 1964. In fact, this begs the question entirely. Boas presents the various English words for different forms of water, then the famous example of Inuktitut words for snow: there are three, indicating what we call falling snow, snow lying on the ground, and drifting snow. notably, Meeuwis and Blommaert 1994), but that view will be treated in greater detail in the following section of this paper. At the same time, they did hold that the language you speak is more than a mere means of conveying thoughts and perceptions that are everywhere the same; that the cut of the language itself has implications for the users point of view on the world. Robert Borofsky, 276282. But three words are plenty to illustrate Boass point: their presence suggests, at least, that Inuktitut speakers conceive three different things where we conceive one, just as English-speakers conceive raindrops, rivers, and lakes as different things even though we know perfectly well that theyre all water. 7.3 Cross-cultural communication Language plays a decisive role when we communicate with others, but he diversity in lg and culture makes cross-cultural communication a highly risky mission. There is no direct evidence that Wintelers linguistic ideas inspired Einsteins theory of relativity; yet, as Konrad Koerner once remarked in this regard (personal communication), Se non e` vero, e` ben trovato. These are the guesses Thomason and Kaufman are talking about, that promote the incorporation of the less marked features into a pidgin. 1999. But a variety of social agents and agencies are needed to regiment and discipline the use of these linguistic and non-linguistic forms to impede or prod the inherent play of linguistic innovation and its resultant social modifications. This is probably correct, despite the mitigating findings of Kay and Maffi and it is why Kay (1999), comparing the Berlin and Kay (1969) and w c s findings to those of Levinson (1999), urges, the w c s data . One goal for the future would be for ethnopoetics to move further toward a grasp of the conceptual categories and oral theoretical traditions of criticism-meager cultures, ethnopoetics in this critical sense drawing on the poetry itself, on statements by native poets and their audiences, on related bodies of knowledge in these cultures (for example, ethnopsychology), and on other methods in the comparative method. The two editors, Christine Jourdan and Claire Lefebvre, were commissioned to assemble an etat des lieux of ethnolinguistics, a term more common in French usage than in English for the study of the embeddedness of language in social and cultural life, in ways of being. des lieux is routinely translated state of the art, but in fact the French Etat and English phrases have very different connotational fields. 1991. Her own research on codeswitching demonstrates the challenges it poses to core tenets of linguistic theory. One consequence of pursuing the question of unitary or differentiated bilingual acquisition is that researchers have neglected a very important acquisition phenomenon, namely the acquisition of code switching itself in early childhood. Provide specific reasons and examples to support your opinion. 1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. space) (what are the semantic concepts in the domain, what are their grammatical properties, how are they used in everyday life, how do they relate to other cultural practices?). One should be careful not to argue for a purely creativist approach to culture genesis, given that the resulting cultural formations owed much to reactive processes than to purely creative ones. Durham, William. Sound patterning certainly has effects on feeling, if not directly on ideation, which are valorized in poetic language (Sapir 1929b [1949]). External and internal are compellingly synthesized in Derek Walcotts Omeros: Homer at his most universal, global problems of ideology, colonialism, and imperialism, a local scene with its Caribbean patois, a view from within of the mind sets of Caribbean fishermen, are woven together by this bard of the Nobel Prize of 1993 (who began as a lad of fifteen peddling his first chapbook of poems from door to door in his native island of Santa Luca). 284 References Mannheim, Bruce. Fourth, researchers are progressively, and sometimes painfully, realizing that the theoretical tools and the dominant working definitions of concepts central to the field of inquiry have become inadequate in view of the complexity revealed by recent data. Where then should one look for such differences? In language, as opposed to the rest of culture, Sapir argued that sound changes made it possible to distinguish the results of genetic diversification from a common ancestor and borrowing or diffusion. 82 Benjamin Lee Whorf and ethnolinguistics 83 to speakers of another language. All English aspectual verbs take gerundial complements (began vibrating), none take bare infinitive complements (*began vibrate), and all except stop, take marked infinitive complements. Cognitive anthropology 103 DAndrade, in an argument recalling modularity assumptions in cognitive science, disputes Geertzs view of culture as an octopus (1995: 249): The empirical fact is that culture looks more like the collected denizens of a tide pool than a single octopus. Piaget, Jean and Barbel Inhelder. These intimate pragmatics migrate unperceived with individuals as they enter and transgress public and intimate spheres, orienting their expectations, and demands, accounting in part for why no one ever quite gets what they are trying to say. Most used an experimental design where child speakers were told that an investigator only understood one language, thus inhibiting the use of the other language. The animated back-and-forth between Schuchardt and his French colleagues was nothing new in the field. Crago (1988: 210211) describes Inuit interactions with two children under the age of two years: Suusi and Jini were the youngest of the four children at the outset of the videotaping. 1985. As noted earlier, all Kaluli children actively participate in extensive prompting sequences. In other words, these two types of terms, verbals and substantives, seem to reflect two basically different types of experience (Hickerson 1975: 228). Lee, Penny. The constant emergence of traces of different languages in the speech of individual bilinguals goes against the expectation that languages will neatly correspond to separate domains, and stay put where they are meant to stay put. In some countries people are happy when they retire and remain very active. At the same time, a minority linguistics, emerging out of the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), would seek to analyze the greatest possible variety of language types in order to identify the specific essence of each. Friedrich found inspiration in Sapir, and his efforts helped link questions of grammatical structure and world view to the burgeoning ethnopoetics movement (Friedrich, this volume; Hill and Mannheim 1992: 397398). Adults assume that all Haitian children learn to speak creole; it is integral with their Haitian identity. Pinxten, R., I. van Dooren, and F. Harvey. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Item Weight: 18.4 Oz They remained alive through the continual arrival of new slaves or laborers, but most importantly, through peoples individual and sometimes collective memories. Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks. . 1986. Some parents allow their teenage children to live independently, away from home. Perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation in our world is that today many people look back to the world of the porous self with nostalgia. Lucys interpretation of Conklins newly cut bamboo example is as follows: . mother) and thus may not have the situational opportunity to take on the role of overhearers of nonsimplified conversations. ), Anthropological poetics, 241261. 1992. 1974. But we are being continuously responsive to rightness, and that is why we always recognize the relevance of a challenge that we have misspoken. However, the boundaries between such phenomena are usually fuzzy, and so it is no surprise that definitions of codeswitching have been bountiful, and arriving at watertight taxonomies difficult. This remains a valid method, but, it was soon felt, cannot replace either full-scale participatory ethnography or consideration of all aspects of a language, not only lexical arrays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Language in desire, a semiotic approach to literature and art. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Ontological relativity and other essays. Cultural ethnopoetics can be illustrated by two exemplary pieces of research from the Islamic area. ), Language, culture, and society. Lucys description of these hypothetical data does not add up to any clear picture. As shown in Table 11.2, the initial /t/ of English two is the regular counterpart of Latin initial /d/, as in duo; the /d/ of double is not (cp. Their conclusions appeared to contradict standard interpretations of the Whorfian hypothesis. Some eighteenth century antecedents of nineteenth century linguistics: the discovery of Finno-Ugrian. In Dell Hymes (ed. Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier; ein Vademacum der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. At the core of that challenge lie two issues: first, how to understand the processes of contact itself with regard to such a reified understanding of culture; and second, how to analyze the effects of contact-induced change. 1995. Aspects sociolinguistiques de la francisation dune entreprise montrealaise. Sociologie et societes 21(2): 115128. How to start your agree/ disagree essay. McLaughlin, B. 1990. 1996. This means of constraining hypotheses is familiar to those archaeologists, who, in response to criticism of archaeologys cooptation in the service of imperialism and nationalism, have sought to reconcile a realist view of history with the necessarily contingent and socio-historically conditioned nature of historical reconstruction (Kohl 1998: 233). Evidence for linguistic relativity. In other ways, however, the occasionally incarnated ideals of linguistic and poetic relativism wither away or are at least problematized. Language diversity and thought. In other words, it requires overturning the stronger etymology in favor of the weaker one, and abandoning a single source for both senses of trobar for the less elegant solution of a split etymology. 1987. By an ironic paradox, it is the great poetry that firmly buttresses both a radical, nave relativism, since many poems from the world sample are not just comparable but equal to each other, and a radical, essentializing universalism whereby, as an empirical fact, many poems from the world sample speak deeply to us all. The crucial coding is in the body expressive language. Grammatical form as infrequent but appropriate for child use A language socialization approach to grammatical development can also help to account for why young children produce forms that are relatively rare in their verbal environment. Poetic language and the imagination: a reformulation of the Sapir Hypothesis. In Anwar S. Dil (ed. Women, fire and other dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind. Feuer goes on to say that linguistic relativity is the argument that each language is a completely sealed universe: The principle of linguistic relativity argues that there are incommensurable cultural universes. There has to be the sense of their being worthy of this desire. Excitable speech, a politics of the performative. On the other hand, children who are expected to participate actively in communicative exchanges somewhat later in their childhood hear predominantly unsimplified speech and are treated as conversational partners less frequently. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Anyone can say I declare the meeting adjourned, but the utterance will only be efficacious if there is in fact a meeting going on, the speaker has the floor, he or she has been invested with the authority of chairperson, and so forth. Fragments of a lost heritage. 1981. What is your stand about the issue of young children having mobile phones? The new intellectual climate and greatly increased knowledge about language and about mental functioning is demonstrated in the interdisciplinary book of Gumperz and Levinson (1996), which explores evidence that different languages code the world with distinct semantic concepts, that these influence cognitive processes, and that a wider definition of meaning one that incorporates contextual influences on interpretation provides the basis for a new view of linguistic relativity based in cultural practices, social interaction, and the social distribution of knowledge and understanding (Gumperz and Levinson 1996: 8). 1997. How these scenes are typically structured, how they are connected to each other and to the situation of speech, are likely to vary as much as any other aspect of language use and to depend to some degree on the specifics of the language being used. Closely coupled with such studies of the poetry in culture have been the equally numerous postmodernist enterprises of taking anthropological texts, including ones that are about literature, and assuming that they are basically literary with, for example, the figures and other formal traits of a novel (Geertz 1986). These are empirical questions which I cannot answer. 1982. 2003. Wierzbicka, Anna. But the fundamental question posed has had to do with whether existing global theories of language can account for bilingual forms and practices.

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language, culture and society topics