I.F.D.

N°7

PROFESORADO DE INGLÉS

LINGUISTICS I

Name: Maria Fernanda Achaval Rodriguez.

Lesson: Language and culture.

Year: 3rd year.

Activity A)
  Draw a mid-mapping to brainstorm ideas related to culture.
Include pictures to illustrate your ideas. You can work on Word so you can
download images, draw it on paper or cut and paste images from
magazines.

Typical
Meals

Desserts
Culture of Argentina

Typical
Sports

Typical Dance
Activity B)

Read George Yule´s Language and culture and find out the following definitions:

 Culture.

 Category. Provide (an) example(s).

 Lexicalized. Provide (an) example(s).

 Non-lexicalized. Provide (an) example(s).

1. Culture

We use the term culture to refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and
people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as ‘socially
acquired knowledge’. This is the kind of knowledge that, like our first language, we initially acquire
without conscious awareness. We develop awareness of our knowledge, and hence of our culture,
only after having developed language. The particular language we learn through the process of
cultural transmission provides us, at least initially, with a readymade system of categorizing the
world around us and our experience of it.

2. Category

A category is a group with certain features in common and we can think of the vocabulary
we learn as an inherited set of category labels. These are the words for referring to
concepts that people in our social world have typically needed to talk about. An example of
category is food that is made from grains.

3. Lexicalized

Form, express, or accept as (a word) in the vocabulary of a language. For example: In

some languages, the equivalent of the word fatheris used not only for ‘male parent’, but
also for ‘male parent’s brother’. In English, we use the word uncle for this other type of
individual. We have lexicalized the distinction between the two concepts. Yet, we also use
the same word (uncle) for ‘female parent’s brother’, whereas other languages may use a
separate word to capture that concept. In Norwegian, the distinction between ‘male
parent’s mother’ (farmor) and ‘female parent’s mother’ (mormor) is lexicalized, but in
English the word grandmother is generally used for both.
 4. Non-Lexicalized

Is a term people use for things that seem borderline linguistic, like sniffs, coughs, and
grunts. However, it’s rarely a great idea to define things in terms of what they are not. In
fact we can think of many of these things as liminal signs: signs that can but need not be
used communicatively because they occupy the borderland between sound and speech.

Activity C)

Read Steven Brown´s Language and culture and refer to the following key

concepts:

 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.

 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: strong version and weak version.

1. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: linguistic determinism and linguistic

relativity.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named for anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee
Whorf, had two parts. The first was linguistic determinism, the idea that a people's
language dictated the way they spoke. The second was linguistic relativity, the idea that
translating ideas from one language to another was extremely difficult and perhaps
impossible.

2. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: strong version and weak version.

Whorf took the work of Boas and its extension by Sapir and promulgated the strong
version of what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the linguistic
relativity hypothesis: language determines thought. People think a certain way, he
said, and can think only that way because of their language. As Whorf's claims have
been more closely investigated, it seems that the strong version of the theory cannot
stand.

Most people seem to accept what is called the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis: language and culture influence each other. This is really not very
satisfactory in terms of a theory, but the idea seems to pervade most people's
beliefs. Most people agree that there is an interaction between language and
culture, that language influences, but does not determine, culture.