Language and culture

Around the 1950’s linguists began looking at language differently. They began to see how closely related a person’s language and their culture really are.

Doctrine of linguistic relavtivity

The beginnings of this change start with the doctrine of linguistic relativity. The doctrine of linguistic relativity states that all known languages and dialects are effective means of communication.

In the 19^th century linguists used to rate languages as primitive and advanced based on an evolutionary scale of a group’s society. They termed languages advanced and complex if they were spoken by “civilized” people and if they were spoken by hunters and gatherers, that is tribal peoples, the language was considered primitive and simple.

A very famous Anthropologist named Franz Boas proved this approach to understanding language and culture in general to be very wrong.

It became evident to Boas and later others that languages could not be rated on a scale from simple to complex and that there was no one-to-one relationship between technological complexity or cultural complexity and linguistic complexity.

All languages known to linguists, regardless of their society are equally complex.

Languages spoken by tribal peoples are as systematically patterned as English or Latin.

This truth is known as linguistic relativity. The parallel concept when studying other cultures is called cultural relativity. All things are equal and relative to one another.

We will adopt both these doctrine in this class. I do not want any discussions about one language being better than another, or one dialect being better than another, because this is simply NOT FACT. It is opinion. As sociolinguists we do not base anything on opinions—only facts.

Boas also convincingly demonstrated that it was necessary to analyze each language in terms of its own structure. This is not to say that there are no universals in language. There have to be since all languages have a phonemic system, a morphology, and syntax.

There are two important theories about the nature of language that changed how we look at and analyze language in any context. These are probably the two most difficult concepts we will be discussing in the course, but discussing them will prepare you to think in a necessarily different way about language than you might be use to.

Chomsky

The first, and one of the biggest influences on linguistics was a book by Noam Chomsky called “Syntactic Structure.”

Noam Chomsky is considered one of the fathers of modern linguistics. He has been studying languages for over fifty years, and is also very politically active, so you may have heard his name in the news. He is also, interestingly, Ukrainian, on his father’s side. I tried to find to out what Oblast his father was from, but it was taking too much time. Maybe if someone decides to do their research paper on one of Chomsky’s linguistic contributions—they can tell us.

Chomsky’s book advocated a new method of linguistic analysis called:

**TRANSFORMATATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR [put on board]

Noam Chomsky is a very wordy person. His books are dense and difficult to comprehend, hence the name Transformational-generative grammar.

Transformational grammar seeks to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a fundamental structure exists.

At it’s most basic, this approach to studying language says that language is more than the surface phenomena, i.e. sounds, words, and word order. Beneath the surface all languages share a limited set of organizing principles.

Draw diagram Surface layer: Sounds, word order, word function

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Deep structure Though/Culture

Chomsky believes that the brain contains a genetically transmitted outline or plan for learning languages. He calls this plan a UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR [put on board]

When children learn a language they don’t start from scratch, they already have the outline.

*DRAW A MAP ON THE BOARD (something like a grid)

As we learn to speak, we master a specific set of grammar, a particular set of grammatical rules, the ones our language has taken from the UNIVERSAL SET.

These rules let us convert what we want to say into what we do say.

*SHADE ONLY A PART OF THE GRID—SHOW THAT OTHER LANGUAGES IN ANOTHER PART OF THE GRID.

People who hear us and speak our language understand our meaning, but it also means those who do not yet know our rules, can learn them because they are similar to theirs.

Our knowledge of the rules enables us to use language creatively, to generate an infinite number of sentences according to a finite number of rules—we can produce sentences that on one has ever said before and we can understand other people’s original statements because we know our language plan. Other’s can learn our language “plan” because their language “plan” has similar patterns.

Chomsky calls this level of language our language COMPETENCE, that is what we know consciously or unconsciously about our language. He calls what we DO with our language, that is the sounds, words, inflections, and usage, PERFORMANCE.

As Chomsky says,

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly…To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one.

Chomsky is saying we have to look deeper than the PERFORMANCE level, deeper than the surface sounds, words, and inflections, we make when we speak, to the level of COMPETENCE, that is how we know what we just sort of know when we speak.

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