What aspects of language are defined by -- or define -- culture?
What is our understanding of how metaphors
and metaphor systems reflect underlying attitudes and expectations?
Cognition can be thought of as the act or process of obtaining knowledge, including perceiving, recognizing, reasoning, and judging. Cognition involves thinking, knowing, remembering, categorizing and problem solving. Language refers to a system of symbols that is used to communicate information and knowledge. How does thinking affect language? How does language affect thinking? How do they influence each other?
“Do people who speak different languages think about and experience the world differently?” And if so, are these differences in thinking due to the structural and lexical (language or vocabulary) differences in the languages spoken? Linguists Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir are the original proponents of this line of thought, which is known as the “linguistic relativity hypothesis.”
Verbal Hygiene
It is a term, used by Deborah Cameron to describe how people respond to the “urge to meddle in matters of language.” It covers a wide range of activities, from writing letters to editors complaining about the 'deterioration' and 'abuse' of language, through prescriptions and proscriptions about what constitutes 'proper', 'correct' and 'acceptable' usage in a range of contexts, to using language as a political weapon.
Michigan's smallest public university, Lake Superior State, has released its 36th annual List of Banished Words: 14 supposedly worn-out, misused, unnecessary, and generally annoying words and expressions of 2011:
- viral
- epic
- fail
- wow factor
- a-ha moment
- backstory
- BFF
- man up
- refudiate
- mamma grizzlies
- the American people
- I'm just sayin'
- Facebook and Google as verbs
- live life to the fullest
"hopefully" -- "thankfully"
The traditional, undisputed senses of these words are active: "in a hopeful manner", "in a thankful manner." There is a dispute over the passive use of "hopefully" ("It is to be hoped that") and passive sense of "thankfully" ("We can be thankful that").
William Safire said, "The word 'hopefully' has become the litmus test to determine whether one is a language snob or a language slob."
"Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets."
-- Eddy Peters
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
 |
| Benjamin Lee Whorf |
August 26, 2010
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”).
From NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all
 |
| Edward Sapir |
In his analysis of Native American languages, Benjamin Lee Whorf noticed that the particular words selected to describe or label objects often influenced people's perceptions and behavior.
Linguistic Determinism
The medium is the message, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic determinism) is that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their languages.
- Testing Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: if Whorf is right then it is difficult to identify colours which your language does not have a name for. But although people form the Dani tribe in New Guinea, use only two colour terms (corresponding to black and white or dark and light), it was found that they could recognize and distinguish between subtle shades of colours that their language had no names for (pale blue vs. turquoise).
- Different discourse patterns can reflect different patterns of thinking or socio-cultural relationships, for example: a similar news report can be represented differently from one newspaper to another, in form and content.
 |
| George Lakoff |
Definitions: What are tag questions for Lakoff and what are their functions?
According to Lakoff, tag questions are syntactic devices that are used more by men to express uncertainty (she's very nice, isn't she) and they are used more by women to express positive politeness (you will study for the exam, won't you?). Involves Euphemism and Dysphemism.
"Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne."
-- Quentin Crisp
Linguistics and Economics Connection Investigated
From an article by Dan Stein November 15, 2011
According to a Yale professor’s recent study, high savings rates in
certain countries may be due to how citizens speak in the future tense.
In a working paper published in August, Keith Chen, an associate
professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, argued that
speakers of languages with a “weak,” or less distinguished, future tense
are more likely to save money for the future. According to the paper,
speakers of these languages feel more connected to their future selves
because of the linguistic difference, which makes them 30 percent more
likely to have saved money in a given year. However, three linguistics
professors interviewed said they remain deeply skeptical about the
implications of Chen’s research for their field.
Chen said he first realized language and saving might be connected
early in his career: His parents, “invariant savers” who grew up in
poverty, would remind him to save more because he “wasn’t speaking
Chinese,” he said.
“Different languages make you pay attention to different things,” Chen said.
For example, Chen said, in English one says “I will be meeting with a
student tomorrow,” but the equivalent phrase in Mandarin Chinese is “I
meet with student tomorrow.” He explained that languages such as
English use a “strong,” clearly differentiated and obligatory future
tense, which creates a “bigger wedge between you and ‘future you’.” By
contrast, languages with a weak and non-obligatory future tense, such as
Chinese, make less of a distinction between the present and the future,
he said.
These differences then force the speaker to subconsciously consider
his or her relationship to the future differently, Chen said.
In a recent article for the Los Angeles Times,
reporter Hector Becerra details the East L.A. accent, a Chicano English
he said he, as a Mexican-American, took for granted until a phone
conversation sparked his interest.
"A couple years ago I got a call from someone who had an
Irish-sounding last name," Becerra told KPCC's Patt Morrison on Friday.
"He had what I thought was a Mexican-American accent, a kind of
multi-generational one — not an immigrant one, and it turns out he’s
grown up in Boyle Heights."
What caught his attention was the accent's spread across races and
cultures; an expression of identity in neighborhoods where the way of
speech reigns, including Boyle Heights, East L.A., Lincoln Heights, El
Sereno and City Terrace.
"If I grew up in Boston, I would probably have a Boston accent, even
though there's no genetic reason for why I should. If you grew up around
the culture, that environment, it's sort of natural that you’re going
to pick up the way people speak around you," he said.
According to the Times, linguists propose that Chicano English stems
from an indigenous group in Mexico, Nahuatl. Higher vowel sounds mark
the ends of words and "ch" sounds are replaced with "sh." L.A. becomes
"all-ay," and the word "barely" often substitutes for "just," for
example: "I barely got out of the shower."
Becerra interviewed Japanese-American and German-English residents
who picked up the accent, and found that they use it with pride. Carmen
Fought, linguistics professor at Pitzer College, said the East L.A.
accent has avoided homogenizing with other Los Angeles communities
because it's a form of expression.
"Dialects and ways of speaking are about our identity. They're joy,
they're the way we express our connection to the people in our
community," she said.
With the accent comes a stereotype; Becerra said many associate the
East L.A. accent with Hispanic gang members, cholos. But he went on to
say that they often speak in an exaggerated style.
"Some people that speak with an accent, they use a lot of slang," he
said. "But not everybody does that; for some people it's just sort of a
sound system that sounds vaguely Mexican in its rhythms and tones, even
though the speaker might not actually speak Spanish."
Becerra said that the accent is most prevalent in East L.A. because
the region is a "Mecca of Mexican Culture," but similar versions can be
detected in San Fernando Valley and other parts of the Southwest.
You Are What You Speak
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language.
Metalinguistic Awareness has been defined as "the ability to objectify language and dissect it as an arbitrary linguistic code independent of meaning"
Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison and other African-American writers have noted that negative symbolism and connotations surrounding the word "black" outnumber positive ones. They have argued that the good vs. evil dualism associated with white and black frames racist ideation and reinforces it through prejudiced colloquialisms. They argued that the good vs. bad dualism associated with white and black unconsciously frame prejudiced colloquialisms. In the 1970s the term black replaced Negro in the United States
No comments:
Post a Comment