20 Language and culture (Yule) PDF

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Book: The Study of Language
Author: George Yule
Edition: 5th
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Summarized by Zahra Al-Hashimy Book: The Study of Language Author: George Yule Edition: 5th

CHAPTER 20   *    ￮ Language and culture

 Culture  culture: socially acquired knowledge

 In order to use words such as dog or horse, snow or snowflake, father or uncle, week or weekend, we must have a conceptual system that includes these people, things and ideas as distinct and identifiable categories.  Categories  category: a group with certain features in common

 We can think of the vocabulary we learn as a set of category labels, these are the words for referring to concepts that people in our social world have typically needed to talk about.  lexicalized: expressed as a single word, in contrast to non-lexicalized

 There are conceptual distinctions that are lexicalized ( “expressed as a single word”) in one language and not in another.  Kinship terms  kinship terms: words used to refer to people who are members of the same family that indicate their relationship with other members  Time concepts  Linguistic relativity  linguistic relativity: the idea that, to some extent, we think about the world using categories provided by our language, in contrast to linguistic determinism linguistic relativism A weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that different languages encode different categories, and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. For example, speakers of languages that have fewer color words will be less sensitive to gradations of color.  linguistic determinism: the idea that we can only think in the categories provided by our language, in contrast to linguistic relativity linguistic determinism The strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak establishes how we perceive and think about the world.

 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪrˈ(h)wɔrf haɪˌpɑθəsəs/: the general idea that differences in language structure cause people to view the world differently, from the names of two American linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis The proposition that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them. It is often presented in its weak form, linguistic relativism , and its strong form, linguistic determinism.  Against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  Snow  Non-lexicalized categories  non-lexicalized: not expressed as a single word, in contrast to lexicalized

 If thinking and perception were totally determined by language, then the concept of language change would be impossible.

 The human manipulates the language, not the other way round.  Cognitive categories  Classifiers

 As a way of analyzing cognition, or how people think, we can look at language structure for clues, not for causes.  classifiers: grammatical markers that indicate the type or “class” of a noun  countable: type of noun that can be used in English with a/an and the plural (e.g. a cup, two cups), in contrast to non-countable  non-countable: type of noun that is not used in English with a/an or the plural (e.g. *a furniture, *two furnitures), in contrast to countable

 Classifier-type expressions: such as “item of” or “piece of,” as in an item of clothing and two pieces of furniture.  The existence of a grammatical class of “non-countable entities” is evidence of a type of cognitive categorization underlying the expression of quantity in English.

 Social categories  social category: a category in which group members are defined by social connections  Address terms  address term: a word or phrase for the person being talked or written to  T/V distinction: the difference between pronouns such as tu (socially close) and vous (socially distant) in French, used as address terms  Gender  gender: a term used in three ways: (1) a biological distinction between male and female, also called natural gender; (2) a distinction between classes of nouns as masculine, feminine (or neuter), also called grammatical gender; (3) a distinction between the social roles of men and women, also called social gender  social gender: a distinction between individuals in terms of their social roles as women and men, in contrast to other types of gender

 Becoming a social gender also involves becoming familiar with gendered language use.  Gender words

 There can be differences between the words used by men and women in a variety of languages.  There are other words, used to talk about men and women, which seem to imply that the words for men are “normal” and the words for women are “special additions.” ￮ Pairs such as hero–heroine or actor–actress ￮ Other terms, such as career woman and working mother (rarely “career man” or “working father”)

 Gender structure

 Generally speaking, whenever there is a higher- versus lower-prestige variable (e.g. talking/talkin’ or I saw it/I seen it), women are more likely to use the higher-prestige forms.  Gender speech  pitch: the effect of vibration in the vocal folds, making voices sound lower, higher, rising or falling

 Men speak in a lower pitch range (80–200 Herz) than women (120–400 Herz).  tag questions: short questions consisting of an auxiliary (e.g. don ’t) and a pronoun (e.g. you), added to the end of a statement (e.g. I hate it when it rains all day, don’t you?)  Same-gender talk  Gender interaction

 In same-gender conversations, women produce more back-channels as indicators of listening and paying attention.  back-channels: the use of words (yeah) and sounds (hmm) by listeners while someone else is speaking...