2050
Chapter Company
LOGO
COMD 20: Language and culture
Culture
Socially acquired knowledge
In order to use words we must have a
conceptual system that includes all
people, things and ideas as identifiable
categories.
EX: snow, weekend
Linguistic determinism
Developed in the 1930s
Linguistic determinism: we can only think in the
categories provided by our language
Thought is determined by categories available
in a language
Eskimos and snow
Linguistic relativity: we think about the world
using categories provided by our language
Linguistic determinism
If linguistic determinism were true,
language change would be impossible.
We dont inherit a fixed set of patterns to
use. We are discovering new things all
the time, and if language determined
thought, we would not be able to accept
and think about new things because there
would not be any new words for them.
Linguistic determinism
Words and phrases are being coined all
the time to label and describe things that
are discovered.
It seems more appropriate to say that
language changes to accommodate
thought and ideas, not the other way
around.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Proponents of linguistic determinism
Thought that the language of Native
Americans led them to view the world
differently from those who spoke
European languages.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
In the Hopi language, there is
grammatical animacy marker: some
nouns are marked as animate and others
are inanimate.
Clouds and stones are animate
5 days vs. until the 5th day
Eskimos and snow
Large number of expressions for different
types of snow (lexicalized).
How do we describe snow?
Language universals
Properties shared by every human
language. Every human language:
Can be learned by children
Employs an arbitrary symbol system
Can be used to send and receive messages
Has nounlike and verblike components which
are organized within a limited set of patterns
to produce complex utterances.
Cognitive Categories: Classifiers
Countable vs. non-contable
This is the closest that English comes to using
classifiers (which indicate the type or class of
nouns)
Countable: shirt, word, chair
Non-countable: clothing, information,
furniture
In English, it is ungrammatical to use a/an
or the plural with non-countable nouns
*a clothing, information, *an * two furnitures
Social Categories
These are categories of social
organization that we use to say how we
are connected or related to others.
Technical
Familial
Friends
Occupational
Social Categories cont.
Address Terms
A word or phrase for the person being talked
or written to
More typically, an interaction based on an
unequal relationship will feature address
terms using a title or a title + name
Social Categories cont.
T/V distinction
In many languages, there is a choice between
pronouns used for addressees who are
socially close and those who are distinct
Modeled off of French:
Tu (close)
Vous (distant)
Gender
Grammatical gender is the distinction used
to classify nouns as masculine and
feminine
Social Gender:
Distinction we make when we use words like
man and woman to classify individuals in
terms of their social roles
Gender cont.
In Sidamo (spoken in Ethiopia), there are
some words used only by men and some
used only by women ex. Milk
What are some of the modern day
examples in English?
Gendered Speech
Men vs. Women
Pitch: used to describe the effect of vibration
in the vocal cords
Tag Questions: short questions consisting of
an auxiliary and a pronoun added to the end
of a statement (You like books, dont you?)
Indirect Speech Acts: thought by some
researchers to be preferred by women in their
speech
Gendered Interaction
Women
Men
Frequent question-type
forms
Facilitate the exchange of
turns
View conversation as a
shared activity
Interaction is organized in
a hierarchical fashion
having the floor is the
treated as the goal
Generally take longer
turns at speaking
In some instances, only
ones allowed to speak
Gendered Interaction cont.
In same-gender conversations, there is
little difference in the number of times
speakers interrupt each other.
In cross-gender interactions, men are
much more likely to interrupt women
96% of the identified interruptions were men
interrupting women in one study involving
American college students
Gendered Interaction cont.
Back-channels
In conversation, occurs more often in women
Describes the use of words (yeah, really?) or
sounds (hmm, oh) by listeners while someone
else is speaking.
Men not only use them less, they view these
as a form of agreement