- •Vygotsky managed to introduce some notions to get the idea of the relationships of l and t.
- •In wm thought and l unite into verbal thought.
- •Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.
- •Language and Culture
- •It goes without saying that the mere content of l is intimately related to Culture.
- •In English there is a whole of terms for different kinds of dogs: hound, mastiff, spaniel, terrier, poodle, and each will call up different images.
- •Sapir’s understanding of language
- •It is wrong to say that the l is localized in the brain. We have no organs of speech – there’s organs that are useful in the production of speech sounds.
- •Sapir’ Thought and language
- •Cognitive Linguistics
- •Verbal means
- •Language, Mind, Culture and Society
- •Language and society
- •Sociolinguistics
- •It is the hierarchical structuring of groups within a society, reflecting inequalities among sectors of population (income, occupation, education and access to social, economic and political power).
- •In Great Britain the study of calss styles shows:
- •Discourse analysis
- •Van Dijk:
Cognitive Linguistics
Culture results from sharing of individuals’ lived experience
Culture provides us with cultural presuppositions (culture-specific background assumptions against which an action, theory, expression or utterance makes sense).
They are expressed and transmitted through language.
Types of CP:
Shared knowledge of facts, events, objects that are significant for this culture;
CP of universal concepts such as time, space, etc.;
Culture-specific understanding of appropriate attitudes, relations between people, goals and wishes, etc. (joking or insulting)
CS ideas of appropriate behavior, including verbal behavior (“How are you?”)
Culture-bound values and evaluations
Associations caused by common historical experience, way of life, everyday routine, etc.
Verbal means
They can express CP.
Semantic fields: degree of specification in designation of this or that sphere of reality
Prototypical categories
New words and new meanings in polysemes (use of metaphor)
Collocations and idioms
Modality
Cultural scenarios for stereotypical situations
Lecture 4 17.11.11
Language, Mind, Culture and Society
The purpose of linguistics is to explain language.
Language is so intricately and intimately bound up with human life that its essential nature is not easy to discern.
Language signs, being arbitrary, provide for abstraction: enable us to set up conceptual categories to define our own world.
Language doesn’t just reflect reality, but creates it. In this sense, it provides us with an explanation of experience.
The languages of different communities will represent different variants of reality, so the explanation of experience is a matter of cultural custom and linguistic convention.
The essential nature of language is cognitive. The form of language reveals a lot about the human mind.
It also functions as a means of communication and social control. It is internalized in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experienced in the external world as actual behavior.
The way of looking at L therefore is to see in terms of the social functions it serves.
Language and society
It is fashioned as systems of signs to meet the elaborate cultural and communal needs of human societies.
The focus of attention in this case is on what Michal Halliday calls “language as a social semiotic”, that is on language as a system of signs which are socially motivated.
Language not as genetic endowment, but as generic accomplishment.
Are human beings absolutely unique in their use of systems of signs to express social meaning?
No animal signaling system displays the creative potential and complexiety of structure which we have noted in human language.
The signs animals use are hardly comparable to the subtleties of the semiotic systems that have been developed in language to service the complex social organizations and communicative requrements of human communal life.
Michael Halliday:
Ideational function – language provides the means to classify and organize the environment and so bring under control by a process of what we might call conceptual projection.
Interpersonal function: language provides the means for people to interact with each other, to establish a basis for cooperative action and social relations.