BS English

LANGUAGE & CULTURE

Course Code: 9059
Study Guide

Department of English
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
BS

Code No 9059 Unit 1-9

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
(Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities)

ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD

 COURSE TEAM

Chairman of the Course Team Dr Malik Ajmal Gulzar

Course Development Coordinator Dr Lubna Umar

Writer Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewer Ms. Fatima Nagrah

Editor Ms Humaira
 Introduction
This study guide is designed to provide a discussion for the BS English Students of Allama
Iqbal Open University to understand the basics of ‘Language and Culture’ who have had no prior
knowledge of the subject. The style of the book is specially tailored in a way that talks to the
students and gently steers them in a direction that the students are supposed to take. Following the
University format, this study guide comprises a total of nine units that not only discuss, but also
provides assessment questions at the end of each unit.
The first unit is designed to provide an overview of ‘Language and Culture’ which is a
subject that falls under the domain of sociolinguistics. While doing so, it mainly focuses on
defining language, its nature, culture, culture as a system, the relationship between language and
culture and the language and thought hypothesis given forth by Sapir and Whorf. Unit 1defines in
detail the complex phenomena of Language and Culture, explains language in terms of the two
theories, namely, ‘Enframing Theory’ and ‘Constitutive Theory’. The students will be able to
understand the various important concepts which are used in the field of ‘Language and Culture’
such as, nature of language, language as a system of symbols, language as a system of meaning,
culture as a system and culture and society
Unit 2 of this study guide is designed to provide a detailed discussion on the relationship
between language and culture from the perspective of context. While doing so, the focus is mainly
on defining what is meant by context, its relation with language and culture studies, various types
of contexts that need to be taken into account while interpreting language, various models proposed
by theorists and the psychological aspect of it on meaning making. For this unit, the following are
the learning objectives. This unit helps define what is meant by ‘Context’ and the complex
phenomena of ‘context’ in language and culture studies. It will also help students understand the
relation between ‘context’ and culture in terms of the ‘Dynamic Model of Meaning’ and help
readers understand what formulaic language is and recognize it as carrier of culture.
Unit 3 of this student guide is designed to provide a detailed discussion of how language
and culture help in the construction and propagation of identity of the language users by explaining
in detail the background of how ‘Identity’ is constructed via language in a particular in culture.
While doing so, its focus is mainly on defining what is meant by the term identity, how language
is used to construct identity, how it is accepted in a cultural background. Also, it helps students
understand the significance of mother tongue in developing ‘Identity’. Moreover, it provides a
discussion of how ideology helps form identity as a social construct by explaining what language
attitude is.
Unit 4 is designed to provide a detailed discussion of how language and culture help in the
construction of gender. While doing so, the focus is mainly on defining what is meant by the term
gender, social construction of gender, gendered language and the relation between gender and
power. Moreover, it will also present a comprehensive account of different approaches towards
language and gender. For this unit, the following are the learning objectives.
Unit 5 is designed to provide a detailed discussion the phenomenon of politeness in
language that is different in different cultures. This unit focusses on defining what is meant by the
term politeness, discuss and identify the many types of politeness strategies that users employ
during the process of talking. For a detailed understanding of the phenomenon, it also presents the
politeness maxims given forth by Geoffery Leech that form the underlying principal for users of
language. Politeness principles are adhered to by individuals in a social setup to develop effective
communicative relations with other individuals for which the concept of ‘face’ needs to be known
by language users. This unit also talks about the two different types of face, namely positive and
negative face wants of peoples. It finally ends by explaining how politeness strategies may vary
across cultures.
Unit 6 is designed to provide a discussion on kinship language, that is, the kinship
terminological system. While doing so, the focus is mainly on defining kinship language,
identifying kinship terms, their background and how they are classified. Moreover, it will also
discuss the lexicalized items pertaining to kinship and how they are presented across cultures.
Understand the background of the kinship language. This unit helps students understand the
descent system that help identify kinship terms in a culture and develop an idea about how kinship
is seen across cultures.
Unit 7 is uniquely designed to include two sections where section one talks about colour
terminology while section number two talks about emotional language. Section one aims at
defining in detail what is colour language while explaining what are colour patterns that are found
in a language and colour lexemes used by language users. It also helps readers understand Berlin
and Kay’s colour terminology that talks about nature of language, language as a system of symbols,
language as a system of meaning, culture as a system and culture and society. It also talks how
colour terms manifest across cultures. Section two talks begins by defining what is language in
association with the psychological construction of emotions. it helps students understand the
relationship of culture and emotional language along with the understanding of perception of
emotion in a foreign cultures.
Unit 8 is designed to provide an overview of ‘Embodiment, Culture and Language’ that
links the language and culture debate with our bodily experiences. While doing so, the focus is
mainly on defining what is meant by the notion of embodiment, how the body is a culturally
constructed phenomenon and how its understanding helps us understand various concepts in
language that are interpreted through the embodied experience. Moreover, it will also discuss how
different cultures attach different meaning to certain words and how they differ across cultures.
Unit 9 is designed to provide an overview of ‘Language, Culture and Second Language
Acquisition’. While doing so, the focus is mainly on understanding the concept of foreign language
learning, the relation between language and culture from a foreign language learning perspective.
Moreover, it will also talk about the five C’s in foreign language learning in order to enrich the
understanding of the students.
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Contents
Unit 1 ...................................................................................................................................................... 5
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE: ..................................................................................................................... 5
AN OVERVIEW ......................................................................................................................................... 5
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 5
1.1 Language ....................................................................................................................................... 7
1.2 Definitions ..................................................................................................................................... 7
1.3 Nature of Language....................................................................................................................... 8
1.4 Language as System of Meaning ................................................................................................... 9
1.5 Language as a System of Symbols ............................................................................................... 10
1.6 Culture......................................................................................................................................... 11
1.7 Language and Culture ................................................................................................................. 13
1.8 Linguistic Determinism and Linguistic Relativity......................................................................... 14
1.9 Assessment Questions ................................................................................................................ 17
Unit 2 .................................................................................................................................................... 18
LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CONTEXT ................................................................................................... 18
2. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 19
2.1 Context ........................................................................................................................................ 20
2.2 Culture in Context ....................................................................................................................... 22
2.3 The Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM) and Context................................................................ 24
2.4 Two Sides of Word Meaning ....................................................................................................... 24
2.5 Formulaic Language as Carrier of Culture ................................................................................... 25
2.6 Assessment Questions ................................................................................................................ 28
Unit 3 .................................................................................................................................................... 29
LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY ................................................................................................... 29
3. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 30
3.1 What is Identity? ......................................................................................................................... 31
3.2 The Idea of Identity in Language ................................................................................................. 31
3.3 Background ................................................................................................................................. 31
3.4 Personal and Collective Identities ............................................................................................... 32
3.5 Language and Identity................................................................................................................. 33
3.6 Language Attitude ....................................................................................................................... 34
3.7 Ideology....................................................................................................................................... 35
3.8 Relationship Between Language, Identity and Culture .............................................................. 35
3.9 Assessment Questions ................................................................................................................ 38
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Unit 4 .................................................................................................................................................... 39
LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND GENDER .................................................................................................... 39
4. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 40
4.1 Gender ........................................................................................................................................ 41
4.2 Gender Stratification................................................................................................................... 41
4.3 Language and Gender ................................................................................................................. 41
4.4 Language and Gender Construction ........................................................................................... 42
4.5 Language Gender and Power ...................................................................................................... 44
4.6 Different Approaches of Language and Gender ......................................................................... 45
4.7 Theoretical Perspectives ............................................................................................................. 46
4.8 Language and Gender in Education ............................................................................................ 49
4.9 Language and Gender in Media .................................................................................................. 50
4.10 Assessment Questions .............................................................................................................. 51
Unit 5 .................................................................................................................................................... 52
LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND POLITENESS............................................................................................... 52
5. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 53
5.1 What Is Politeness? ..................................................................................................................... 54
5.2 Illustrating Politeness .................................................................................................................. 54
5.3 Politeness Principles ................................................................................................................... 55
5.4 Politeness versus Indirectness .................................................................................................... 55
5.5 Impoliteness ................................................................................................................................ 55
5.6 Politeness and Culture ................................................................................................................ 56
5.7 Face and Politeness ..................................................................................................................... 56
5.8 Types of Politeness ..................................................................................................................... 58
5.9 Politeness and Society ................................................................................................................ 62
5.10 Assessment Questions .............................................................................................................. 62
Unit 6 .................................................................................................................................................... 63
KINSHIP LANGUAGE .............................................................................................................................. 63
6. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 64
6.1 Kinship Terminology.................................................................................................................... 65
6.2 Background ................................................................................................................................. 65
6.3 Kinship Terminological System ................................................................................................... 66
6.4 Lexicalized Categories ................................................................................................................. 67
6.5 Kinship Terms in Sociolinguistics ................................................................................................ 67
6.6 Kinship Symbols and Descent Systems ....................................................................................... 68
6.7 Basic Kinship Classification Systems Across Cultures ................................................................. 69
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6.7.1 Sudanese Kin Terms .......................................................................................................... 69

6.8 Assessment Questions ................................................................................................................ 74
Unit 7 .................................................................................................................................................... 75
COLOUR TERMINOLOGY AND EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE ....................................................................... 75
7. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 76
SECTION I .......................................................................................................................................... 77
COLOUR TERMINOLOGY ................................................................................................................... 77
7.1 Meaning of Colour Terms ........................................................................................................... 77
7.2 Patterns ....................................................................................................................................... 77
7.3 Berlin and Kay’s basic colour terms ............................................................................................ 78
7.4 Colour Lexemes ........................................................................................................................... 79
7.5 The Place of Colour Terms in Culture ......................................................................................... 79
SECTION II ......................................................................................................................................... 81
EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE ................................................................................................................... 81
7.6 Constructing Emotions ................................................................................................................ 81
7.7 Language Culture & Emotional Language ................................................................................... 82
7.8 Automatic Processing of Emotion Words in Bilinguals ............................................................... 82
7.9 Perception of Emotion in a Foreign Culture ............................................................................... 83
7.10 Emotion concepts in bilinguals ................................................................................................. 83
7.11 Assessment Questions .............................................................................................................. 86
Unit 8 .................................................................................................................................................... 87
EMBODIMENT, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE........................................................................................... 87
8. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 88
8.1 The Notion of Embodiment ........................................................................................................ 89
8.2 A Historical Overview: Cartesian Dualism ................................................................................... 90
8.3 Challenges of Cartenianism......................................................................................................... 90
8.4 Body as a culturally constructed concept ................................................................................... 93
8.5 Embodiment and culture in language ......................................................................................... 95
8.6 Assessment Questions ................................................................................................................ 98
Unit 9 .................................................................................................................................................... 99
LANGUAGE, CULTURE ........................................................................................................................... 99
AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING .................................................................................................... 99
9. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 100
9.1 Foreign Language Learning and Culture ................................................................................... 101
9.2 Language and culture: the uncontested duo ............................................................................ 101
9.3 The Five C’s of Foreign Language Learning ............................................................................... 102
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9.4 The New Global Age .................................................................................................................. 103

9.5 Communication ......................................................................................................................... 105
9.6 Language ................................................................................................................................... 105
9.7 Culture....................................................................................................................................... 106
9.8 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 108
9.9 Assessment Questions .............................................................................................................. 109
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Unit 1

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE:

AN OVERVIEW

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By :Ms Fatima Nagrah

1. Introduction
 6

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide an overview of ‘Language and Culture’ which
is a subject that falls under the domain of sociolinguistics. While doing so, the focus is mainly
on defining language, its nature, culture, culture as a system, the relationship between language
and culture and the language and thought hypothesis given forth by Sapir and Whorf. For this
unit, the following are the learning objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define in detail the complex phenomena of Language and Culture.

2. Explain Language in terms of the two theories:

• Enframing Theory
• Constitutive Theory

3. Understand the various important concepts which are used in the field of ‘Language
and Culture’ such as:

• Nature of Language
• Language as a System of Symbols
• Language as a System of Meaning
• Culture as a System
• Culture and Society

4. Develop an understanding of the two versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the

study of ‘Language and Culture’
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1.1 Language

Language is derived from the Latin word ‘Lingua’ which is similar to the French term
‘Langue’, meaning ‘tongue’. The phenomenon of language is associated with human
communication involving vocals and auditory senses along with emotions and ideas. Based on
this idea of human communication language is often considered a social phenomenon that is
only relevant in a social setting and keeps on changing continuously – which often goes
unnoticed. Over a passage of time, it becomes sharp, crisp, refined and versatile. The evidence
of this change lies in the historical background of any language – grammar, pronunciation,
semantics (study of words) and pragmatics (study of context). Which proves that language
evolves and is a living phenomenon.

Dear students if you recall, you have studied this phenomenon in detail in your course of
History of English Language in the previous semester. Let us now look at the broader sense of
language.
In its broadest and most general sense, language is known to be a means of expression and
mental concepts which are not only exchanged between humans but also other living beings.
In other words, we can say that language is generally understood to be a medium through which
expressions and ideas are transferred from one person to another or one speech community to
another. This makes language a complex phenomenon and all attempts of defining it become
inadequate and unsatisfactory. In addition to this, it may be said that language is an organized
noise used in actual social situations and which is why most of its definitions revolve around
the idea of contextualized systematic sounds (sounds produced in certain contexts
i.e.situations).

1.2 Definitions

In order to further understand the point of views of different theorists and to provide a deeper
understanding of how the concept of language has been defined, we shall now look at different
definitions of it.
“Language is a primarily human and non- instinctive method of communicating ideas,emotions
and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols” (Sapir).
"Language, in its widest sense, means the sum total of such signs of our thoughts andfeelings
as are capable of external perception and as could be produced and repeatedat will" (A. H.
Gardiner).
"Language may be defined as the expression of thought by means of speech-sounds"(Henry
Sweet).
"A system of communication by sound i.e., through the organs of speech and hearing,among
human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbolspossessing arbitrary
conventional meanings." (Mario A Pei & Frank Gaynor).
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“Language is human...a verbal systematic symbolism... a means of transmittinginformation...a

form of social behaviour... (with a) high degree of convention" (J.Whatmough).
"A language (is a) symbol system... based on pure or arbitrary Convention...
infinitelyextendable and modifiable according to the l bunging needs and conditions of
thespeakers" (R. H. Robins).
"A language is a device that establishes sound-meaning correlations, pairing meaningswith
signals to enable people to exchange ideas through observable sequences ofsound" (Ronals W.
Langacker).
"A language is "audible, articulate human speech as produced by the action of thetongue and
adjacent vocal organs... The body of words and methods of combiningwords used and
understood by a considerable community, especially when fixed andelaborated by long usage;
a tongue" (Webster).

1.3 Nature of Language

The study of the nature of language has always been complex. I shall try to explain it in the
light of the ‘enframing theory’ and ‘constitutive theory’. The enframing theory of language
attempts to understand language in relation to human life, behaviour, purposes, or mental
functioning.However, this understanding of life events is not dependant on language. Whereas,
the ‘constitutive theory of language gives us a picture of language as making possible new
purposes, new levels of behavior and new meanings. Let us now look at both these theories of
language in detail.

1.3.1 The Enframing Theory

The enframing theory states that the mind has ‘ideas’ and these ideas represent our reality.
Knowledge is created when our internal reality i.e. ideas and the external reality match. To
create a correct version of reality we must organize our ‘ideas’ becausethe concept of ‘beliefs’
that we form is also based on this reality and our understanding of it. Language plays a vital
role in the construction of these ideas, realities and beliefs. The words that we use become
meaningful when we attach our ideas to them, and help us in understanding the non-linguistic
aspects of the reality. Therefore, we can say that there is a strong relationship between our ideas
and the words. Hence, language is understood not in isolation but on the basis of different
elements including ideas, signs, their association and meaning.

1.3.2 The Constitutive Theory

The constitutive theory states that a word is introduced with the help of an already existing idea
that it gets associated with and is then enabled to express it. In addition, introducing different
words provides us greater control over our train of thoughts and allows us to differentiate
between our ideas. This means that if we identify and clearly differentiate between different
words and their synonyms (similar in meaning words) we will have even greater control over
 9

our thoughts. In this way, language makes possible science and enlightenment – however, at
each stage of this process the idea precedes its naming.
Let us now look at the contribution of this theory in the development of language. The theory
under discussion provides an important role to the emotional expression in the overall creation
of language. The initially established signs were derived from natural ones which were just the
in-built expression of our emotional states. In the eighteenth century, it was believed that
language originated from expressive cries i.e. of joy and fear etc. However, the origin of such
expressions is not the beginning of the concept of language. What the expression conveyed was
thought to exist independently of its utterance. Cries made of fear or joy evident to others but
they didn’t constitute these feelings themselves.
Furthermore, language includes the semantic dimensions, i.e. the process of the construction
of meaning. Processing language introduces new ways of creating relationships between things
e.g. new emotions, goals, relationships and being responsive to the issues of strong values.
Therefore, we can say that language transforms our world and all the things in it – cosmos
(universe understood to be a systematic and organized) and the world of our involvement and
all the things that incorporate meaning for us.
Before moving further, let’s try to understand the idea of meaning for human beings. It is
believed that things become meaningful for us when they have a certain significance or
relevance in our lives that is when we are able to relate to them or associate them with some
part of our lives. It is through this association and the importance that language introduces new
meanings in our world; the things around us become potential bearers of properties (they have
certain characteristics), they can have new emotional significance for us e.g. as objects of
admiration and indignation. We create links with people around us and consider them ‘friends’
or ‘fellow citizens’ based on this idea.

1.4 Language as System of Meaning

The relationship between language and meaning is not a straightforward (simple) one. One
reason for this complicated relationship is the limitlessness (they can change with time and add
or remove certain elements) of modern language systems like English. The other reason could
be that language is productive (depending on the use); it involves many utterances based on
connections with different ideas that we encounter on a daily basis that generate different
meanings. Although, It is understood that words are not the only things we need in order to
communicate, but since the idea of non-verbal (without using words) communication is not as
limitless or productive - words require more attention to be understood. Hence, language and
meaning cannot share a less complicated relationship.

It has already been established from our previous discussion that language provides us the
freedom to create new concepts and meanings. But how is meaning generated (produced,
created)? We understand something through the interaction of our nervous and sensory systems
and some stimulus (some external element that causes humans to react) outside of them. It is
from this interaction, that meaning is formed and interpreted. The indirect and sometimes
complicated relationship between language and meaning can lead to confusion, frustration or
even humor. We may even experience a little of all three, when we stop to think about how
there are some twenty-five definitions available to tell us the meaning of word meaning! Since
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language and symbols are the primary vehicle for our communication, it is important that we
not take the components of our verbal communication for granted. In the next section, we shall
understand language as a symbol-based system of meaningi.e not only dependent on words.

Activity: Look up the meaning of the word COINED and try to find at least two words that
have been newly coined in your native language. Also, try to find out the reason why there was
a need for them to be coined.

1.5 Language as a System of Symbols

Language is considered to be a carrier of meaning (holds meaning that is relevant to us ), and

is defined as a symbol based meaning system in relation to culture. This system consists of
arbitrary (not fixed) symbols (words) that help in transferring meaning from one mind to
another. One speech community, sharing and using different symbols and common rules is able
to communicate and exchange infinite number of messages and ideas. Based on this sharing, it
is then not possible to say that social bonds and interactions are separate from language and
society. This social bond exists on the basis of symbolic (not concrete) and shared
communication hence, making language the most important medium of human
communication. As a result of this, language we can say serves two major (interrelated and
mutually dependent) functions namely:
(1) language is a carrier of specific content of learning.
(2) language is a critical factor creating, reshaping and binding social relationships.
The first function means processes of cultural transmission in time and space. Considering the
language as a fundamental element of culture we can say that culture is learned and transmitted
via symbols. Language is a specific vehicle to the transmission of particular content of culture
from generation to generation, person to person, group to group, and from one culture to
another. So long as ideas and chains of thought can be translated into words, the learning
acquired by one individual can be transmitted to other individuals and become available for
them to use. Now knowledge or new discoveries can be acquired by those who have access to
a common language without being required to make each discovery anew from individual
experience.
With regard to second function, language is considered as the basis for specifying rules so that
different individuals can act with an expectation that others will behave in accordance with
those rules. Rules provide the basis for a first order of selection that takes account of the
interdependent interests of others. So, individual learns the rules of culture in order to meet the
standards of other people.
At this point, we can say that culture creates a socially shared space of common understanding
i.e. to say that through expressions and contexts that are shared by people a general and more
specific worldview is formed. This worldview provides people with answers to some questions
related to human existence, nature and society. Having said this, the role of language cannot
be ignored here, even more so it is only through language that people are able to grasp some
idea of their surroundings and social settings. Because language is not merely for the
communication and exchanging of ideas or understating emotions. It is also something that is
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used to understand experience – that varies from person to person, speech community to speech
community. No human being can respond to complex elements present in the external world.
What human beings do notice is what is talked about, how they feel and whatever else functions
as a part of our linguistic patterns (the ways in which we use language following grammatical
rules). Normally, it is assumed that all people think or understand in the same way, as we do.
It is only when people receiving the same signs and words in the same situations come form
different results or conclusions that we realize the difference – how the patterns work
differently and are received differently by different individuals. Thus, thanks to culture people
understand who they are, who are their kin, what are their social rule orders. Hence, now it
becomes necessary to understand what this ‘culture’ actually is. So, let’s talk about culture!

1.6 Culture

As we have seen in the preceding section, culture is a kind of linguistic index that contains
general directives of human actions. At the same time culture helps to define concrete kinds of
situations of human behavior. It provides specific rules which allow people to act appropriately
in almost every (and often in completely new) situations. Culture, therefore, is a set of ready-
made definitions of the situation which each participant only slightly tailors in their own way.
People are aware of how to act in a given situation and what is expected from them. We can
say that people’s actions and relations are predictable (can be guessed beforehand) and have
an impact on their choices. In this sense, shared knowledge and understanding of culture is the
most important factor for human existence. This goes without saying that every human group
(sharing similar and having different ideas) culture is shared differently.
The nature and notion of culture is no diverse and broad that most theorists do not agree upon
a single definition. A culture is an organized set of learned behavior and its results that is
exchanged between different members of a particular society. In other words, we can say that
culture is a pattern of human behavior having an in-depth and strong relation with language.
At this stage, I would like to briefly discuss the systematic character of culture and the
problem of the relationship it shares with an individual.

1.6.1 Culture as a system

First, up to now we have stated that culture enables people to attach meaning to human actions,
that culture is learned and transmitted in symbolic way. Moreover, besides common there are
also differentiated meanings within every culture, that culture is kind of guide for human
situational behavior providing people with sets of rules. Culture defined in such a wide way is
also very often treated in systemic terms, that is, as a system with fixed features. The systemic
feature of culture has been up to now approved as one of the most important characteristics of
culture. So, culture is a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human and partly spiritual, by
which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems that face him. So, culture is
treated as a tool, instrumental apparatus (problem solving instrument) which is used by people
in the process of satisfaction of their different needs; and culture is a system of objects,
activities, and attitudes and it is a whole in which the various elements are interdependent.
Thus, culture is a systemic, integrated structure.
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Activity: After reading the above section about the nature of language and culture, can you
make a table and note down the various beliefs that can be identified in the culture that you
inhabit?

In fact, the contents of culture can be summarized in the following manner:

➢ The ways in which people have organized their experience of their phenomenal world
so as to give it structure as a system of cause and effective relationships, that is, the
propositions and beliefs by which they explain events and accomplish their purposes.

➢ The ways in which people have organized their experience of the real world so as to
give it structure as a phenomenal world of forms, their percepts, and concepts.

➢ The ways in which people have organized their experiences so as to structure their
world in hierarchies of preferences, namely their value or sentimental systems.

➢ The ways in which people have organized their experience of their past efforts to
accomplish recurring purposes into operational procedures for accomplishing these
purposes in the future, that is, a set of grammatical principles of action and a series of
recipes for accomplishing particular ends.
As a matter of fact, culture sets some standards for when it comes to deciding what is, what
can be, and how one feels about it along with what to do about it. It is quite apparent that
culture is a ubiquitous force i.e. present everywhere, determining our identities and our
relationships with other things and people. If it wasn’t for culture, we would be a little more
than--- gibbering, incomprehensible idiots, less capable of mere survival than a member of
the very earliest tribe of prehistoric people (people existing before everything was
recorded).The social legacy an individual acquires from his group leads to the belief that to
be human means to be cultured.

1.6.2 Culture and Society

Culture is usually realized as synonymous with civilization. It is mostly used in English to refer
to the state when art, literature, manners and social institutions of specific people or nation
reach an excellent level of advancement. Culture may sometimes be used in its wider sense,
i.e., to refer to human progress in general without specifying certain society. In this sense we
can speak about the development of human culture from stone ages up to modern times. With
regard to the first sense of the word it is possible to speak about the Arab culture, Islamic
culture, British..., French... etc. In short, each nation has developed its own culture.It is
universally known that language and culture are linked in one way or another. Many studies
have proved that they have mutual affection. Since culture (as defined by Sapir which you will
read in the proceeding units) refers to what a society does and think, we can say then that
language affects, and is affected by how we think and behave. Language, being a social
practice, is part of culture. So, a common language may be reasonably regarded as an evident
symbol of common culture.
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1.7 Language and Culture

The nature of the relation between language and culture has been and continues to be soa
subject of many studies and speculations carried out by scholars in the fields of psychology,
philosophy, anthropology etc. This can be traced back to 2500 years ago when the Greeks
considered the issue and advocated that thinking and perception of the world are independent
of language; that is only used to express them. In the recent times, there have been many
attempts made to investigate this relationship which provokes great deal of debate and
completely opposite points of view. One of the noteworthy hypotheses that claimed to settle
this controversial issue is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which language is not just
an element of culture which interacts with many other elements, rather it is the source from
which cultures emerge and take shape.

The notion that language and culture share a strong relationship has been very popular and
understudy for long - that the phonetic structural elements, sounds of the language and the ways
in which speakers of a language understand the world and behave should be related. But the
ways in which they relate varies and it is because of this variation it becomes only appropriate
to discuss how different theorists approach the idea of a shared relationship between language
and culture.
‘A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know and or believe in order to operate
in a manner acceptable to its members and to do so in any role that accept for any one of
themselves.’ The knowledge pertaining to culture is socially acquired. The members of a
particular society learn the necessary behaviours and they do not inherit them from others.
According to Edward Sapir, language and culture are closely associated and one cannot be
understood or appreciated without knowledge of the other. Language is a social institution both
shaping and shaped by society at large or in particular the ‘cultural niches’ in which it plays an
important role. If we assume that language is/or should be understood as cultural practice, then
we ought to admit the notion of culture in relation to language.
According to Fairclough, language is not an autonomous construct but a social mechanism both
creating and created by the structures and forces of the social institutions within which we live
and function. It is apparent that language cannot exist in a vacuum and one can be firm in one’s
assertion that there is a kind of transfusion that operates between language and culture.
According to Duranti, to be part of a culture means to share the propositional knowledge and
the rules of interference necessary to understand whether certain propositions are true (given
certain premises). To the propositional knowledge, one might add the procedural knowledge
to carry out tasks such as cooking, weaving, farming, fishing, giving a formal speech,
answering the phone, asking a favour, writing a letter for a job application.
According to Eleanor Armour and Sharon-Ann Gopaul, it’s quite obvious that language used
for everyday interaction is a mixture of cultural bits and pieces. In the course of our speech,
we assume social and cultural roles, which are so deeply enriched in our thought processes as
to go unnoticed. Culture defines not only what its members should think or learn but also
what they should ignore or treat as irrelevant. So, it can be safely said that language does not
exist apart from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and
beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.
 14

At this point it becomes essential to talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that discusses the
relation between language and thought. Since language culture and thought are interrelated
concepts, this will add to your understanding of the ongoing discussion regarding language and
culture. Before we discuss the main idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, let us discuss the two
main ideas that form the basis for it. They are:
• Linguistic Determinism
• Linguistic Relativity

1.8 Linguistic Determinism and Linguistic Relativity

Whenever, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mentioned, the terms linguistic determinism and

linguistic relativity come to light. These two terms are the basis of the hypothesis and mostly
help in understanding its main philosophy. The roots of these two terms can be traced back to
the nineteenth century as they were first used by Humboldt and Herder when they stressed the
influence of language structure upon the categorization of thought and experience; language
determines the way people understand and organize their worlds. The term Linguistic
determinism reflects the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human
knowledge or thought along with the thought processes; categorization, memory and
perception. It is based on the implication that people with different mother tongues have
different thought processes.
This idea revolves around the notion that language is an inescapable shaper of ideas; the
program and guide for an individual’s mental activity. Humboldt and Herder emphasized on
the diversity of language structure. They believed that no two languages describe the world in
the same way or share the same world view. Each language then provides its speech community
a ready-made system of categorizing what they perceive, a system that is completely different
from the systems of other languages. Linguistic relativity is based on the idea that each
language shapes its speakers’ world view differently and thus people’s perceptions (what they
understand of the world) are relative to the language they speak.

1.8.1 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

In the 1930s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf adopted the viewpoints of Humboldt and
Herder that were presented in the previous century and they tried to support them by carrying
out experimental researches on the languages of remote societies. There is a straight line of
development from Herder to Sapir and Whorf, who popularized essentially the same thesis of
linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity in the twentieth century America. Most of the
references that study Sapir-Whorf hypothesis usually deal with it as having two versions. A
strong version; which is severely attacked and mostly rejected by all and a weaker version;
which is less extreme and more acceptable.

1.8.2 The Strong Version

According to this hypothesis, human beings view the world in terms of categories and
differences encoded in the language they speak. As a result of this, language does not merely
remain a passive recording instrument rather it becomes an essential factor in creating and
 15

forming our reality and the conception of it. Whorf states that we do not have the freedom to
describe nature with absolute impartiality; rather we are strictly bound by certain moods of
interpretation imposed by the language we speak. This means that we can have experiences
based on the language systems in our minds; which relates to linguistic determinism.

Another principle which is related to linguistic relativity is that the linguistic system provided
by one language is unique to that language and incommensurable with those of other languages.
Since languages are extremely diverse, then all observers are led by completely different
physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, that is, each speech community views
the same world differently in terms of the language it uses. Whorf tried to prove these principles
by investigating the languages of other people like the American Indians and the Eskimos. Yet
the result obtained from his investigations and experimental researches were likely to be, to
certain extent, consistent with the weaker version only.

1.8.3 The Weaker Version

It is believed that the language that one speaks influences, but not determines his thought.
Since it is with the aid of our language that we categorize the objects of our experience
which helps us to view the world, it is then normal to say that our perceiving of the
world is partly affected by our language. Concerning language diversity it is believed that
some language systems facilitate certain ways of thinking and viewing the world, that is, certain
ways of thinking about the world are made easier than others by the semantic functions
associated with its obligatory grammatical categories and classes. For example, it is a well
known fact that thought, memory, and perception are indeed affected by the availability of
suitable vocabularies. Therefore, people tend to notice and remember things and objects which
are ‘codable’ in the language they speak. The viewpoints of the hypothesis in this version are
more acceptable than those of the previous one, partly because they are in correspondence with
the widely common principles underlying the relation between language and culture, and partly
because they were , to certain extent , proved by Whorf’s experimental researches.

For further clarification of what we have already discussed, let’s now take a look at the
experiments that Sapir and Whorf conducted to prove the hypothesis.

1.8.4 Testing the Hypothesis

To test the validity of his hypothesis, Whorf studied different languages of different
peoples. He investigated, for example, the language of the Hopi and Zuni (American Indians),
the Zulu (African Tribes) and the Eskimos...etc. From his experimental work he concluded the
principles of this hypothesis. In short his conclusion was that each people view the world
differently in terms of its own language .To justify his extreme conclusion, Whorf provided
us with the following examples and their indications:
Grammar: Example 1
Whorf found that the grammar of the Hopi includes a distinction between animate and
inanimate, and that the set of entities which is classified as animate includes clouds and
stones. Whorf's conclusion was that the Hopi, as their language leads them, believe that clouds
and stones are animate (living) entities. Since English does not classify clouds and stones
under the category of animate, English speakers then "do not see the world in the same way
as the Hopi. In Whorf's own words ‘we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native
language". However, Whorf himself was unable to prove whether the Hopi actually believe
 16

that clouds are living being because his only evidence was this linguistic categorization which
might be one of their religious or ceremonial traditions. Theorists have provided criticism of
this experiment as his evidence is by no means enough to convince us that the Hopi thinks he
has killed a living creature when he runs over a stone with his car.
Grammar: Example 2
Whorf also claimed that the Hopi is a ‘timeless language’ because it lacks the verb system of
English by which tense indicates anteriority and futurity. And it is because of this 'shortage' the
Hopi operate with quite different concept of time from that followed by the speakers of
European languages. Theorists have provided criticism of this experiment as again Whorf was
unable to provide any evidence of differences in the Hopi's behaviour.
1.8.5 Vocabulary items: Example 1
Let's consider the following cases; to Refer to 'water' the Hopi has two words, the first one
refers to 'water in its natural environment' and the second expresses 'water from a domestic
supply'. The Eskimos have many words to refer to 'snow' to distinguish between, 'falling snow',
'fallen snow', 'igloo snow' etc. Arabic includes about one hundred words for naming the
'camel'. In the Australian languages there is no word which is equivalent to 'sand' but
several words that express various kinds of sand. On the other hand, the Aztecs have only one
word to refer to ' cold', 'ice', and 'snow'. According to Sapir -Whorf hypothesis, the Hopi, forced
by their language, view water as two separate entities rather than one. The same thing can be
said about the other cases, the Eskimos and snow, the Arabs and their camel, the Australian
and their sand. While the Aztecs are supposed to be, due to the influence of their language,
unable to distinguish between cold, ice, and snow.
Theorists have provided criticism of this experiment by stating that the Eskimos may indeed
view snow differently, but this different view is not imposed by their language. On the
contrary, it is their environment and culture that force them to use many different words to
express different kinds of snow, simply because the difference between these kinds of
snow (or sand or camel... etc.) is of great importance in the daily life of these people.
Each language normally reflects the different experience in the different cultural environments
of its speech community.
Vocabulary items: Example 2
A group of American Indians called The Zuni, the language of whom has one word to refer to
orange and yellow colours, were asked to sort some objects according to their colours. It was
found that they classified yellow and orange objects in the same group. According to Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, their language forced them to view yellow and orange as one colour.
Theorists have provided criticism of this experiment that it is said that the normal human being
can be able to distinguish seven million different colours on the spectrum. But in mostly all
languages there are only several words that are used to refer to different colours. This means
that each of these colour words labels chunks of the spectrum. Are all peoples supposed to
divide up the spectrum in exactly identical ways?
 17

1.9 Assessment Questions

1. Define what is meant by language?

2. Can language be understood in isolation; without the element of culture in it?

3. How do humans form culture? Can culture be changed?

4. How has your culture influenced your worldview? How would you explain the culture

that you have grown up in? Give appropriate examples.

 18

Unit 2

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CONTEXT

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By : Ms Fatima Nagrah
 19

2. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide a detailed discussion on the relationship between
language and culture from the perspective of context. While doing so, the focus is mainly on
defining what is meant by context, its relation with language and culture studies, various types
of contexts that need to be taken into account while interpreting language, various models
proposed by theorists and the psychological aspect of it on meaning making. For this unit, the
following are the learning objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define what is meant by ‘Context’.

2. Define in detail the complex phenomena of ‘Context’ in Language and Culture

Studies.

3. Understand the relation between ‘Context’ and culture.

4. Explain the concept of ‘Context’ in terms of the Dynamic Model of Meaning

5. Understand what formulaic language is and recognize it as carrier of culture.

 20

2.1 Context

Context refers to the setting in which communication takes place. The context helps establish
meaning and can influence what is said and how it is said. There are at least four aspects in
regards to this idea: physical, cultural, social-psychological, and temporal. The physical context
refers to the concrete environment. It can be a sporting event, place of worship, or restaurant.
Each atmosphere has its own set of rules for how to communicate (i.e. you would not talk in
the same manner at a basketball game as you would to the masjid). The cultural context refers
to the values, beliefs, lifestyles, and behaviors of a group of people. Such instances will
influence whether something is considered right or wrong by the people involved. For
example, an American may be put off by a French speaker invading his/her space. This
difficultly arises from the very different American and French cultures in terms of proxemics,
for Americans tend to be less comfortable when they are not given personal space. The social-
psychological context involves the norms of the group in a particular situation, including the
intimacy level among speakers and the formality of the exchange. Again, there are certain
rules set regarding how to communicate, for a conversation held between boyfriend and
girlfriend would not be handled in the same manner as a conversation between boss and worker.
And finally, the temporal context is the positioning of a message within a sequence of
conversational events. It governs the mood of the conversation and how topics are to be
addressed and related thereafter. For example, the conversation is carried differently when
someone admits they were fired from a job or when a couple announces the birth of their first
child.
The use of certain expressions may mean different things in different cultures. therefore, it
becomes essential to understand the concept of context in this backdrop. People in different
cultures have preferred ways of talking about a certain aspect such as in the Pakistani context,
we use the term kheriat hai? for asking how a person is doing. So, let’s find out in detail how
a preferred expressions reveal the culture of a people.

2.1.1 Understanding Context through Preferred Expressions

The native-like knowledge of language can be defined as ‘the preferred ways of saying things
and organizing thoughts’. Now the question arises that how do these ‘preferred ways’ come
about? We must understand that the members of a speech community develop unique ways of
using linguistic code among other members of their community, when they use certain words
or expressions to communicate - which are considered to be preferable than other words or
expressions. For instance, certain phenomena like ‘shoot a film’, ‘dust the furniture’, and so
on. It is also desirable to say certain things in particular speech situations such as ‘help yourself’
at the table, ‘welcome aboard’ when greeting a new employee, ‘be my guest’ when answering
a request, ‘stick around’ when asking someone to stay etc. We also feel that we need to mitigate
our criticism toward someone so we start the conversation like ‘not that I cannot understand
your act, but … ’. If we ask for clarification we often say ‘what’s your point? … ’, ‘please make
your point … why don’t you make clear what your point is?’ so on and so forth we could
continue to demonstrate how conventionalized language use is.
To clarify, I simply mean to say that ‘preferred ways’ are specific to language and culture,
because they reflect the thought processes of different speech communities around the world,
their environment and their contexts. This is the reason why learning a new language does not
 21

remain a simple task. Furthermore, we can say that even if the reoccurring contexts are similar
-between our language and the new language we are trying to learn, the way we lexicalize
(express) them differs to a great extent for example, in American English we usually ask
someone to play saying
‘Would you like to play?’ or even ‘Wanna play?’.
In Hungarian culture in the same situationwe ask:
➢ Szabad?’ [‘free’]
This Hungarian word functions as a marker to ask for permission inthe sense ‘are you free to
play?’. Guests are equally valued in American, French, andHungarian society. But lexical
expressions that are used to welcome them demonstrateinteresting differences, for example:
➢ English: Make yourself at home.

➢ French: Faites comme chez vous. (‘Do as [you do] at home’.)

➢ Hungarian: Érezze magat otthon. (‘Feel yourself at home’.)

Even though, these expressions mentioned above can be considered as functional equivalents
(provide the same function), the use of different verbs (French ‘faites’ is the imperative of the
French equivalent of ‘to do’, and the Hungarian ‘érezd’ is the imperative of the Hungarian
equivalent of ‘feel’) shows that each language highlights or brings to attention something else
based on its importance in that language even when it’s used in the same situation (context).
This elaborates and clarifies Sapir’s idea (that you studied in the previous unit) that no two
languages are completely similar to each other or to represent and reflect the same social reality.
2.1.2 Language and Context are Rooted in Culture
The examples discussed previously, demonstrate clearly how language, culture and context are
linked and how this relationship is initiated by culture. Both language and context are a part of
culture i.e. they carry culture and reflect it in their own ways. Language however, represents
the past experiences with different contexts where the contexts are defined on the basis of the
experiences they represent.
It is a known fact that whatever you say or when an individual speaks, the words spoken carry
their own context. In simple words, we cannot understand a word without its context i.e. the
situation in which it was spoken. It is through these words and the context they are spoken in
that the meaning is formed and understood. In this sense, we can conclude that language and
context are inseparable, you cannot understand words without their contexts and the contexts
are better explained through the words. The question to ask here is that which part will
dominate or overshadow the other? This again depends on how the words are spoken and
communicated from one person to another. People who share the contexts (members of a same
speech community) will find it easier to understand and predict what the other person (from
the same speech community) is going to say because of their shared experiences in similar
contexts and background knowledge. Therefore, it can be deduced that people who share
similar contexts understand each other better than people with different contexts or who are
members of a different speech community. We will discuss this further to understand the
complex relationship of culture, language and context.
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2.2 Culture in Context

Dear students, you have studied the concept of culture in the previous unit in detail. Here, we
shall try to understand it in terms of different contexts. It is seen as a socially constituted set of
various kinds of knowledge structures that individuals turn to as relevant situations permit,
enable, and usually encourage. It is a system of shared beliefs, norms, values, customs,
behaviours, etc. that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another.
It is an important trait of culture that it is distributed in different ways and not every member
of a community (social/cultural) live, reflect, or adopt their culture in the same way nor do they
identify with similar things as of their community members. Culture has fuzzy (unclear
boundaries) and it is not taken as a static or an ever-changing concept but as both. Culture
changes both diachronically (slowly through decades) and synchronically (emerges on the spot,
in the moment of speech).
Culture is considered to be situational in nature; it depends on the language used to
communicate in a certain point of time. The nationality or ethnicity of people impacts their
communicative patterns and behaviors. However, in the situational context inter-cultures
(sharing between cultures) are co-constructed and this process contains elements from the
participants’ existing cultural background (what they already know) and elements created for
specific purposes by the participants.
Language is a means of transferring real world experiences and it provides a filter to these
experiences when it verbalizes them (uses words to express them). People who speak more
than one language have more than one transmitter. Why is this important? The reason is not
that anytime we think we must conceptualize (form) our experiences the way language requires
us to. But the reason is that any time we use language to express our thoughts we are required
to conceptualize our experiences the way our language wants us to. To understand this, we
must first grasp the idea of how cognition (whatever we know in our minds) works and its
relationship with language. What we know does not depend entirely on language but our
language is dependent entirely on the words and their meanings. Hence, we have to express on
the basis of what our language dictates us to do and not just our knowledge of the world.

If languages affect our thought process and minds differently it is based on the idea of what
our language limits us to think about. We can only understand this limit by understanding the
‘habitual’ working of language and what culture brings to it. This ‘habitual’ is what connects
language and context through culture. The ‘habitual’ can be described as a scenario, a situation
(context), what is encoded in words and how the words get their meanings depending on their
use in a particular speech community. This is the reason why, we must focus on the context
already a part of our language and the situational context (the situation we are in) to fully
understand the meaning of the linguistic signs being used in that context.

2.2.1 Context as Declarative and Procedural Knowledge

Context is a continuously changing concept which appears in different forms and is determined
as a place where knowledge is stored. The recent theories of meaning making claim that
meaning is created with the help of context and is dependent on it to be completely understood.
Therefore, the linguistic expressions that are understood on the basis of context play an
important role in the construction and comprehension of meaning. But at the same time, it is
 23

also of utmost importance to realize that the background and biases of the speaker of any
language are equally involved in the interpretation (how meaning is understood). We can
simply say that context affects an individual’s interpretation and behavior.
2.2.2 Context and the Two Sides of World Knowledge
Context represents the two sides of what we know about the world, one that is in our minds
and the one that is out there in the world. What we have in our minds sets a ‘prior context’ and
what we are actually facing in the world is the ‘situational context’, the latter is viewed in light
of the perspective of the former when communication takes place. When these two contexts
interact, it creates a new or a third space. According to this approach, meaning is constructed
as a result of this interaction between the prior and the situational context.
To understand how context becomes a part and reflection of our knowledge, we need to first
understand the concepts of declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Declarative
knowledge is about facts and things and procedural knowledge is about how to perform based
on what we know. The prior context (experience) when becomes declarative knowledge i.e.
accepted concept is attached to the meaning values of the lexical units (words) that are part of
utterances (what is said) produced by the speakers (procedural knowledge) when they
communicate with each other, while the current experience (where we stand in a particular
point of time) is represented in the situational context and is understood (interpreted) differently
by the speakers. The words that we know are a result of the prior context that is attached with
them and when we use them and associate our meanings with, as a part of pragmatics – it
triggers the situational context.
To understand the prior context in terms of semantics and pragmatics and the relationship it
shares with the meaning, we will take a few examples:
Example (1) demonstrates how context (in the traditional sense of the term) makes up for the
missing elements of the proposition (what a sentence represents/suggests).

➢ Bob and Mary are engaged (to each other).

➢ Some (not all) girls like playing.

➢ I need to change (clothes).

It is claimed by SCA that all the above sentences are complete without the words in parenthesis
and express context-independent propositions i.e. to understand what the sentences mean we
do not need either a prior context or situational context.
The speaker can say Bob and Maryare engaged true or false without concern for ‘to whom’.
The speaker can say some girls like playing true or false without concern for whether all do,
and can say she needs to change true or false without considering in what way (clothes? diet?
priorities? career?). The words in parenthesis add what that speaker was talking about
specifically, an added propositional element based on actual situational context. But it’s a new
proposition. The one it elaborates is still adequate (complete) in itself as the expression of a
proposition, so I argue that it is a mistake to claim that no sentence is complete without context.
It is more the case that speakers can mean more than the sentence itself means, because context
supplies the rest. But the sentence does say something, completely, and sometimes it is exactly
what the speaker means too.
 24

2.3 The Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM) and Context

The Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM) advocates the idea of broad understanding of context
with both prior and present experiences of the world included. According to the DMM, both
sides of world knowledge (personal context and situational context) play a role in the
construction and comprehension of meaning. The extent of their respective contributions keeps
on changing depending on the situation of the speakers involved in the process of
communication. The DMM is built on two assertions:
(1) The dynamic behaviour of human speech implies a reciprocal process between language
and actual situational context.
The prior context is embedded in the language and helps in understanding the situational
contexts, so language cannot be independent of the context. There exists no meanings that are
free of the contextual element because each lexical item (word) works as a store for context(s)
itself; that is to say that it is always referred to on the basis of context. Even when a context is
not apparent or available, one is constructed from the stored knowledge that is based on prior
experiences during the process of understanding meaning. Suppose we hear or read the
sentence ‘I want to get even with him’ without any situational context, without any difficulty
we’ll all be able to make sense of these words based on our stored knowledge. Surprisingly
enough, we might also come up with the same understanding of this sentence considering the
word ‘even’ is used in figurative sense rather than literal. This shows the how impactful
prominence is in language.
(2) The fact that communication is increasingly intercultural requires the development of a
theory of meaning that can explainnot only unilingual processing but also bi and multilingual
meaning construction andcomprehension.
When we are dealing with one language, we do not come across many complexities or the
complexities do not necessarily make themselves apparent. However, when we take two
languages and compare them or attempt to translate something from one language into another
we realize that different languages have adopted different ways of understanding constructions.
Moreover, different cultures organize their background knowledge differently hence, making
this comparison a complex phenomenon. The process of translating one language into another
requires understanding of the prompts in one language and how they’ll be configured by the
language they are being translated into considering that both languages have different and pre-
structured meaning-prompting systems and different backgrounds.

2.4 Two Sides of Word Meaning

According to DMM, there are two senses of ‘meaning’ and the value it gives to the word it is
attached with. The two senses namely ‘core sense’ and ‘consense’ (contextual sense) help in
interpreting world knowledge and understanding it with the help of prior contexts. Core sense
is a denotational (what the words actually mean), diachronic, relatively constant (for a period
of time), and objective feature that reflects changes in the given speech community. While
consense is the actual, subjective, referential and connotational (what meaning is associated
with words). These senses by their definition bring semantics (denotation) and pragmatics
(connotation) together to represent world knowledge and understanding it through contexts.
 25

2.4.1 Coresense
Coresense is derived from prior contextual occurrences of a word i.e. how many times a word
has been used in a context. It is neither conceptual (idea) nor lexical (word) but a blend of both
linguistic and conceptual levels. This means that it brings together the two levels in order to be
understood. It is depended on not just the properties of given categories of words but is a
summary of the most familiar (commonly used), regular, typical, and mostly frequent uses of
a word. In simple words, it is understood to be driven from the words that are most commonly
used and reflects their history (how they have been used over a certain period of time). The
commonly used words form ‘common core information’ that is based on the public context i.e.
shared linguistic practices of a speech community in different situations. Coresense is not
purely a linguistic phenomenon because it involves extra-linguistic factors as well such as
familiarity, conventionality and frequency. It is an essential feature of the word that brings
together the conceptual semantics (idea) and lexical semantics (word) whenever a word is
uttered or spoken by an individual.
It is generally understood that Coresense develops from different contextual practices that are
most commonly a result of different human interactions. This generalization makes Coresense
a set of different core features of the lexical items, some it gains and some it loses with time –
to understand this better look forinstance, at the historical change in the coresense of the words
such as ‘candy’, ‘kidnap’, ‘school’, ‘snack’ etc.
2.4.2 Consense
Consense is different from corsense because it is never changing while consense (as discussed
earlier) changes with time. Consense shares a certain aspect or aspects of the coresense by
bringing together some of its properties – word-specific (semantic) or culture-specific
(pragmatic/conceptual) when a word is spoken in a situational context. Consense is a mental
representation composed of different conceptual features related to the syntactic structure
(grammar) of a word – which varies depending on the use of that particular word/expression
in a situational context.
Coresense changes diachronically (over a period of time) while consense changes
synchronically (specific point in time). The systematic changes that take place repeatedly in
consense result in changes of coresense. This is evident from the change in the coresense of
the words ‘mouse’, ‘gay’, and ‘google’. As we studied earlier that, Coresense is the blend of
both conceptual and lexical levels linking word-specific and cultural specific properties.
Consenses are just the variations of this coresense in context i.e. in different situations. The
interpretation of the context of coresense is expressed in consense that is a sum of different
consenses of the words that are uttered.

2.5 Formulaic Language as Carrier of Culture

Formulaic language (fixed expressions like idioms) shows how language, culture and context
are interlinked. The formulaic language and the context it is used in or created in are deeply
rooted in culture. That is to say that culture is a sum of the formulaic language and different
contexts of its use, which in turn reflect the same culture they are a part of and become carriers
of it.
 26

2.5.1 Interplay of Prior Context and Actual Situational Context

Formulaic language or fixed expressions in language, especially the ones that are limited by
contextual utterances demonstrate clearly how prior context and situational context interact and
are useful in understanding meaning construction.
Consider the following two conversations:
1. Sam: Coming for a coffee?
Andy: Sorry, I can’t. My stomach won’t let me.
Sam: What’s wrong with you?

2. Sam: Coming for a coffee?

Andy: Sorry, I can’t. My mother-in-law (my wife) won’t let me.
Sam: What’s wrong with you?

The situation-bound utterance ‘What’s wrong with you?’ has two different meanings in (1) and
(2) although the only difference between the two conversations is that ‘My stomach’ is changed
to ‘My mother-in-law’. It is not the actual situational context that creates this difference in
meaning. Rather, it is the stigmatic load(how a certain word is used in language i.e. to label
something/someone) that is attached to the use of the lexical phrase ‘My mother-in-law’, which
has a negative connotation in most contexts. If we use a third option ‘My wife’, the meaning
of ‘What’s wrong with you?’ will depend on the actual situational context, i.e., on how the
hearer processes his friend’s expression ‘My wife’, based on his knowledge about the
relationship between Andy and his wife. In this case, because of the ‘weakness’ of the
conceptual load tied to the expression ‘My wife’, dominance of the actual situational context
becomes obvious.
In these three situations, dominance seems to be changing and depends on what interpretation
the encoded conceptual load of the expression makes possible. If the load is very strong and
deeply conventionalized, the actual situational context can hardly cancel it. Some
‘interpretation sensitive terms’ are interpretation sensitive because of prior context and
collective salience(prominence) of the expression.
Not only conventionalized, pre-fabricated expressions but also ad hoc created expressions can
dominate meaning construction and comprehension if the expression used in the course of
conversation refers to some phenomenon or sense of an expression that is strongly carved in
the mind of interlocutors for some reason. It is also interesting to note that some people more
than others fixate on certain meanings. This also supports the argument that although
individuals may be the members of a speech community, collective salience is distributed
individually.

2.5.2 Psychological Saliency of Formulas

The significance of formulaic language became apparent in earlier linguistic research. A huge
portion of verbal behavior of the speakers makes up the linguistic routines. A great part of our
natural language is formulaic (fixed) and rehearsed instead of creative or a freely produced.
However, with the emergence of huge corpora (collection of texts) understanding the fixed
expressions or the formulaic language has become an even more complicated task.
 27

The large corpora constitutes a lot of information and different aspects of a language hence
making it obvious that almost 80 percent of our language production consists of a lot of fixed
expressions or we can say that our language is based on the fixed expressions and utterances.
But no matter what the actual percentage is, one thing is certain that speakers in
conventional/traditional speech situations tend to do more remembering than putting together.
?
3. Andy: Hi Bob. How are you doing?
Bob: Fine, thank you. How about you?
Andy: I am OK, thanks.

None of the expressions used by the speakers look freely generated. Each of them can be
considered a formula that is tied to this particular kind of situation. However, if we consider
the following conversation, we may see something different.
4. Mary and Peter are talking.
M: If you want to see me again you will need to do what I tell you to.
P: OK, my dear.

There is no doubt that the expressions in italics consist of words that are used more often used
together. But can they be labeled as formulas here? Do they have some psychological
prominence that holds some significance for the speakers? We must think of the answer
carefully because the number of times a word is used is just one of the factors that the formulaic
expressions depend on. The problem here is that the frequency (how often a word is used) is
overemphasized i.e. stressed more than it was necessary in the present-day linguistics
especially the area of corpus linguistics. The modern researches while analyzing the spoken
and written discourse of a language have established that words that are used more often,
repeatedly, and in various forms called the lexical bundles/chunks and multiword expressions
are not only highlighted but also perform significant functions. Cognitive research (research
related to the human mind and how it works) showed that knowledge of these formulaic
expressions is crucial for fluent processing i.e. for individuals to speak with fluency and
understand each other. Further studies have elaborated that extended reach of language
described as the ‘collocational stream’ where different patterns flow into each other. This can
be summarized as, ‘a language user has a lot of pre-constructed (partly) phrases that form a
part of a single choice hence, providing the speaker with innumerable choices of words to use
and analyze.
Biber defined formulaic language as ‘sequences of word forms that commonly go together in
natural discourse’, irrespective of their structural make-up or idiomaticity, and argued that
conversation has a larger amount of lexical bundle types than academic prose. However, there
seems to be a clear difference from the perspective of psychological saliency between
sequences such as ‘to tell the truth’, ‘as a matter of fact’ on the one hand, and ‘I think you …
’, ‘to make it’ on the other, although all these expressions are high on any frequency-based list.
This is why we need to distinguish between groups of prefabricated expressions that have
psychological saliency for speakers of a particular language community and loosely tied,
frequently occurring word sequences (usually consisting of common words) such as ‘if they
want’, ‘to do with it’, ‘and of the’, ‘tell them to’, etc. Psycho-linguistically salient sequences
like ‘on the other hand’,‘suffice it to say’ cohere much more than would be expected by chance.
They are ‘glued together’ and thus measures of association, rather than raw frequency, are
likely more relevant to these formulaic expressions.
 28

Yes, those expressions are ‘glued together’ by conventional use that is rooted in culture. They
are used in reoccurring scenarios, situational contexts. This is why they become customary in
use, which gives them a kind of psychological salience. They are the lexicalization of customs
and values in a speech community. This is how culture penetrates language and how language
reflects culture. Of course, many of those formulas are frozen metaphors. It would be hard for
language users to explain where they come from, why they are the ones that are used in those
reoccurring contexts. Expressions such as ‘piece of cake’, ‘kick the bucket’, ‘it’s not my cup of
tea’, ‘stick around’, and the like are already functional units where the function they refer to is
what really counts not what they actually say. But those formulas represent the heart and soul
of a language, which make the use of language idiomatic and hard to learn for people coming
with a different language and cultural background. This is how culture basically creates the
‘heart and soul’ of language that makes the two inseparables.

2.6 Assessment Questions

1. Define in detail the complex phenomena of ‘Context’ in Language and Culture Studies.

2. Discuss the relation between ‘Context’ and Culture.

3. Describe the Dynamic Model of Meaning and Explain the concept of ‘Context’ in terms

of the Dynamic Model of Meaning?

4. What is understood by the term formulaic language? How is it a carrier of culture?

5. Briefly discuss how formulaic expressions are ‘glued together’ by conventional use?

6. Listen to your friends talking and identify at least 10 formulaic expressions from your

native language used in the Pakistani cultural context.

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Unit 3

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Written By : Dr. Lubna Umar

Reviewed By : Ms. Fatima Nagrah
 30

3. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide a detailed discussion of how language and culture
help in the construction and propagation of identity of the language users.While doing so, the
focus is mainly on defining what is meant by the term identity, how language is used to
construct identity, how it is accepted in a cultural background. Moreover, it provides a
discussion of how ideology helps form identity as a social construct. For this unit, the following
are the learning objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define in detail the complex phenomena of ‘Identity’ in Language and Culture Studies.

2. Understand the background of how ‘Identity’ is constructed via language in a

particular culture.

3. Explain how ideology is involved in creating ‘Identity’.

4. Understand the significance of mother tongue in developing ‘Identity’.

5. Understand what language attitude is.

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3.1 What is Identity?

Language is strictly the means through which we go about our social activities; interaction with
other people, engaging in dialogues, debates etc. It is through this interaction that our cultures
are exchanged and we understand each other’s identities. The concept of identity revolves
around how people see themselves; who they are and how they relate with other people. In
addition to the idea of identity, culture is also embedded in our interaction with other people.
It is not a genetic concept i.e. inherited genetically and cannot exist in isolation. Culture exists
because of the interaction between different members of a society, it is through language then
that it is shared. However, culture is concerned about ‘sharing meaning’ while language is used
to understand or make sense of things and exchange meaning. Moreover, language is important
to culture and meaning and can be considered as the carrier of values and meanings of culture.

3.2 The Idea of Identity in Language

Any study of language has to consider the idea of identity so as to make sense of the idea of
language that is enriched with and a very important part of identity. The concept of identity is
very close to what language is about; how it is learned, how it came into existence and evolved
as it did and how it is used; everyday and by every user. The exact nature of this relationship
between language and identity is a very challenging topic. Some believe that language is
fundamental to ethnic or cultural identity because it includes a cultural worldview and
traditional forms of knowledge. However, others feel that language depends on and is simply
about the behavior of its users, so much so that any language can be replaced easily with a new
one with no effect on the identity of the language it replaces.
Dear students, you have already studied the concept of language in detail in the previous units,
however, consider this as a recap and the precursor of the proceeding information. The next
section will talk about the background of the study of identity and its significance for
individuals.

3.3 Background

Identity, as a concept has recently been developed into a field of study. In pre-modern times,
people were seen in terms of their place in a society instead of as diverse and complex entities
until the idea of the ‘sovereign individual’ came into being. Ever since the idea was introduced,
more attention has been paid to the ‘individual’. However, identity remained to be ‘the very
core or essence of our being’ with the idea of an individual taken as a unified and core concept
- an individual whose inner core remained continuously identical with itself throughout its
existence.
With the growth and advancement of nationalism, the conceptions of identity were linked to
ethnicity and nationality. This again, remained focused on defining people as discrete, pre-
existing categories that represented absolutism and fixedness. However, post-modern discourse
 32

in the social sciences states that individuals have a multidimensional and flexible identity based
on their affiliations and associations with gender, age, religion, social class, culture, ethnicity,
nationality, kinship roles, sexual orientation and language. The variation in affiliations and
associations is according to the context of a particular individual. Hence, it would make more
sense to talk about identities instead of a single identity.
Now, however, postmodern discourse in the social sciences holds that individuals have a
multifaceted and non-static identity based on affiliations such as gender, age, religion, social
class, culture, ethnicity, nationality, kinship roles, sexual orientation andlanguage. Different
affiliations may be privileged at differenttimes for a single individual, depending on the
context. Indeed, it may even be moreaccurate to speak of identities, than of a single identity.
According to Lekme, identity is described as:
We are always ourselves, but who we are, who we portray ourselves as being, who we
are construed as being changes with interactants and settings, with age of life. Identities
develop and change, they are at least multi-faceted if not in fact plural. Their
consistency and continuity are ourconstructions, mandated by our cultural notions of
the kinds of selves that are normal and abnormal in our community.
Based on the above description, identity is not something we inherently possess but instead it
is something that is socially constructed. In fact, if we accept that identities are constructed, the
question then is: how does this process take place? The main ingredients to the construction
process are the complementary ideas of Self and Other, or ‘sameness and difference’. We
would not be able understand or even begin to understand our own identity without coming
face to face with another i.e. outside ourselves. Here it is important to differentiate between
personal identity and collective identity.

3.4 Personal and Collective Identities

Personal identity is related to the idea of personality; the sense of sameness and continuity that
persists across time and space, the self-consciousness and awareness that assures us of the fact
that person is oneself and not someone else. In this sense, the Self is literally the individual and
everyone else falls under ‘Other’. On the other hand, collective identity refers to the sense of
group unity where one aligns with specific individuals based on certain shared and understood
characteristics while at the same time separates oneself from others who do not share these
traits. It is then elaborated that collective identity is a social construct that forms an ‘imagined
community’ on the basis of the sense of groupness with the major differences of ethnicity,
nationality, religion, class, language, and so on, among its group members.

3.4.1 Sameness and Identity

The term identity refers to sameness, which makes people assume that identity is most
prominent among similar people. Yet, this apparently simple idea is not as simple to
understand. It is not easy for an outsider to determine when a group of people be labeled as
‘alike’ or ‘same’ nor the factors or features on which such a claim be made are clear given that
 33

variations exist between individuals. Hence, externally imposed categories of identity are based
mostly on the observer’s own identity position and power stakes as with any sort of objective
concept of social reality. These issues often come to surface when linguistic anthropologists
and sociolinguists attempt to characterize the members of a certain speech community - for the
criteria is different in linguistic, social, political, historical and cultural terms.
It is therefore important to take into account the speakers’ own understandings of their
identities as made known by their actions. When individuals decide to classify themselves into
groups, they are driven by their own independence and power. In a French-language high
school in English-speaking Canada, it was seen that students whose linguistic, racial, and ethnic
identities did not conform to the rigid categories available at the school formed a
‘‘multicultural’’ group that based its identity on ethno-racial diversity and a shared resistant
youth style, hiphop. Therefore, we can say that social grouping is a process that works actively
in recognizing similarities rather than focusing on differences. Furthermore, the study of
identity not only requires concealing differences among those with a shared identity, it also
serves to create and highlight differences among members of a particular group and the
outsiders.

3.5 Language and Identity

It is generally accepted that language is related to identity, however the degree to which it is
significant to the idea of identity is debatable. Scholars do not agree that language is only
significant because it is a social practice and means of constructing social identities or that any
language shapes and reflects identity such as the Welsh language considered to be a reflection
of Welsh Identity. A single language that is associated with a certain group can be called a
heritage language, traditional language, ancestral language or simply a mother tongue. The
term ‘mother tongue’ takes special attention because it is generally used and understood, and
yet is not accurately defined despite there being a body of literature available on it – which has
implications for ‘identity’.

3.5.1 Mother Tongue

The majority of authors relate the concept of mother tongue with the first language learned
and/or the language used in the home, and this plays a vital role in how people understand the
term. Skutnabb-Kangas identifies four possible criteria that could help in defining the term
namely origin, identification, competence and function which can be seen from the table given
below:
CRITERION DEFINITION
1 ORIGIN the language one learned first
2 IDENTIFICATION a. internal a. the language one identifies with
b. external b. the language one is identified as a native speaker of
by others

3 COMPETENCE the language one knows best

 34

4 FUNCTION the language one uses most

Table 1: Skutnabb-Kangas Four Possible Mother Tongue Definition Criteria (2008)

These definitions are taken in various combinations depending on the context they are applied
in. Generally, for linguistic majorities all criteria work side by side as for example, in the case
of Francophones in Quebec. However, Skutnabb-Kangas clarifies that the definitions by
competence and function may not be appropriate for linguistic minorities who live, work,
and/or receive submersion education (only/entirely in the majority language) in the majority
language.
Therefore, mother tongue can be defined by origin and internal identification (without any
influence of external factors). However, there are exceptions like in the case of forcibly
assimilated (people who are forced to adopt a certain culture, etc.) indigenous individuals
(existing naturally in their adopted cultures, etc.) whose traditional language was never passed
down to them from a parent or grandparent generation; in this case it is not their first language
but it may become their mother tongue that they do not have any competence (expertise) in.
Individuals can have more than one mother tongue, and that mother change can change based
on all the definitions discussed above except origin - given that identification is one criteria;
universally and ‘fairly’ applicable that is taken into account when defining the mother tongue.
Some theorists believe that our interpretation of reality; how we understand our reality is
governed by language but most claim that language only has an influence on how we perceive
reality. For instance, French grammar assigns masculine and feminine gender to all nouns while
the Plain Cree language does not make this distinction and incorporates another classification
system where nouns are indexed as being animate or inanimate; objects such as trees and rocks
are considered animate - reflecting the Plains Cree cultural belief that natural elements have a
spirit or life. The way these categories and classification are used is a surprise for the speakers
of European languages.
Thus, there is a difference in the perception of French and Pain Cree language speakers; their
perception depends on how their languages are structured. This would also make sense if we
look at it in reverse; perception and cultural beliefs are encoded in the language. Hence, it can
be said that the language that has always been linked with a given ethno-culture is able to name
the artifacts and formulate or express the interests, values and worldviews of that culture.
In other words, it can be deduced that a nation’s language is a system of thought and expression
relevant to that nation and their view of the universe. The close bond formulated between a
specific language and culture implies that ethnic identity is rooted in the language traditionally
linked with the speakers of that particular language and culture.

3.6 Language Attitude

Attitudes are better understood as a ‘mental construct’ by highlighting their relevance with
cognition (mental processes involved in comprehension) and emotion. Attitude can also be
considered as both ‘input’ and ‘output’. When taken in the sense of an ‘input’ it refers to an
attitude (positive or negative) about an activity or skill that contributes to one’s success or
failure in that skill. On the contrary, when taken in the ‘output’ sense, a particular attitude
 35

towards an activity develops because of being involved in that activity like a language class.
Furthermore, it can be said that attitudes have an influence on and are influenced by social
context and experiences – they are at the centre of whatever is learned through human
socialization and are socially constructed. Moreover, attitudes are learned and not inherent
which makes them a reminiscent of the idea of identity; which is also a social construct.

3.7 Ideology

Another significant term often linked with and interchangeably used with attitudes, is ideology.
Ideology refers to codifications (restatement of principles and laws) of group norms and values.
At an individual level, it points to broad perspectives on society. In this sense, ideology maybe
considered a global term. Generally, we can understand and use the term ‘attitude’ to highlight
people’s beliefs, emotions and ideology - in the broader context of the values of a social and
cultural group.
In terms of languages, then, the study of attitudes can be an extremely useful tool, particularly
in the context of language shift. The crucial factor in language maintenance is the attitudes of
the speech community concerning their language. And that it is equally important to investigate
what factors influence those language attitudes. The status, value and importance of a language
is most often and mostly easily measured by attitudes to that language. Such attitudes may be
measured at an individual level, or the common attitudes of a group or community may be
elicited.

3.8 Relationship Between Language, Identity and Culture

The concepts of language, identity and cultural differences highlight the complicated
interrelationship among them and the variation that may influence these three aspects
interchangeably. Language, identity and cultural differences are linked with each other on the
basis of the strong connection between representation and culture. Culture, as a group of shared
meanings, is presented through language; a tool that is used as a representational system. In
other words, we can say that language with the help of different symbols and signs; words,
sounds, images, etc. expresses feelings, emotions and ideas which are thought to be the carriers
of culture and form a greater part of an individual’s identity. Hence, culture and identity are
represented through language. And since different individuals express their culture and identity
differently it makes the differences apparent and quite easy to locate.
There are numerous ways in which the word ‘culture’ can be defined as discussed in Unit 1.
However, we shall try to understand it now from the perspective of identity. Culture is
considered to be the sum of all that has been thought and said in a society – a collection of
ideas represented through different forms of art e.g. painting, literature, music, etc. In addition
to this, culture is also a means of understanding differences among different societies and
communities and their value systems.
 36

3.8.1 Cultural Turn

The cultural turn is a movement that started in the early 1970s among the scholars of humanities
and social sciences to make culture the primary focus of contemporary debates. Along with
this it could also be referred to as the shift in emphasis towards meaning. To elaborate, culture
here is taken in the sense of practices; the exchange of meaning between different societies and
individuals to have a similar understanding of objects. For instance, two people belonging to a
same culture would have a similar understanding of a certain concept, express their thoughts
in a similar manner and would find it easy to connect with each other. Based on this idea, it
can be said that this culture depends on the participants. However, some different
interpretations can be formed that are based on social practices depending on the use and
representations of participants that select the language and the meaning to be shared or we can
say that when people with different identities interact with each other their interpretations vary
because of their individual practices. As a result, belonging and identity are formed when they
talk and communicate with others (people from different cultures). However, some identities
are formed by different means. For example, through the mass media, people’s identities can
be represented to others through meaning, including and making use of different events, and
then balancing them according to the social context. On the other hand, identities such as
cultural identity are not clearly represented because of the different positions of its participants
i.e. people relate to different things and interpret the world differently.

3.8.2 The Identity Centric Circuit of Culture

This cultural circuit consists of five levels, namely: production, consumption, representation,
regulation and identity. Each of these levels focuses on explaining the process of creating
meaning in culture. Production being the first level is about how people create meaning or
associate a special meaning with an object or idea. Then they share and make use of that
meaning balancing it with its function in a certain context or the context in which it was
produced. Furthermore, participants introduce this meaning to others representing it as a special
identity or mark. It can be said that there is no starting or finishing point in this circuit because
meanings are produced synergistically (in collaboration).
The representation of meaning through language is the core of meaning production, as
meanings are created with the help of language. On this very basis, linguistic elements like
words and sounds are essential along with colors and non-verbal modes which play a vital role
in creating and conveying meaning. But these linguistic verbal and non-verbal elements will
vary when the exchange will happen between different cultures thereby introducing cultural
difference. This cultural difference will then make way for special identities. For example,
when fans of one football team use a special slogan, they, in fact, introduce the language that
presents their culture, and that indicates their belonging and their identity in the sense that they
are different from the fans of other teams. Moreover, producing new meaning or historical truth
can be reflected by the functions of visual language. For instance, when an exhibition shows
the objects of other cultures, it may introduce the history of these cultures or may create new
meanings. It may also reflect the identity of people who attend the exhibit and those who are
exhibited (the ones this exhibition is about).
 37

We form a sense of our identities; who we are and with whom we belong on the basis of
meaning that is produced and exchanged through social and personal interaction. Members of
the same culture share the same sets of concepts, ideas and images that enable them to think,
feel and understand the world in similar ways and also they should share the same cultural
codes. In other words, ideas and concepts must be shared by members while they speak or have
great knowledge of a unified language. Therefore, a conventional view which describes things
as they exist in the world i.e. first according to their natural characteristics and then their
representation can be changed by the cultural turn which implies that meaning is created rather
than an already existing entity.
To role of representation appears in the social constructional approach because culture is
considered to be a significant component of representation through which language presents a
general frame work of how they work together. He mentions two approaches: the semiotic
approach deals with how representation works and with how language produces meanings and
the discursive approach is concerned with the effects and results of representations. There are
no wrong or right meanings because meanings change according to their usage, context, and
historical events. They are governed by power, emotions, and feeling, so they play a big role
in identifying others in terms of excluding or including them, especially once ‘identity is
marked.
This discussion revolves around the idea of representation which is an important and essential
aspect in the formation of the complicated relationship between language, identity and culture.
Furthermore, it will look into the representation process that forms and shapes ideas, feelings
and concepts with the help of their interpretation in a certain culture. At the end, the discussion
concludes that individuals involved in exchanging meaning having similar cultural codes find
it easy to communicate and reflect their identity and culture to others.
3.8.3 Example Illustrating Language Identity and Cultural Relationships
According to a study, when Saudi people go to shops such as a grocery store to buy some goods
like dates or coffee, usually they ask the seller about the quality of the products by asking this
simple question: ‘is it good?’ This question asks whether the goods are in a high quality.
Whereas in Australia when an Australian grocery store salesman was asked same question that
‘is it good?’ The seller became angry and said, ‘What do you mean by saying “is it good?”’
The seller interpretedthe question wrongly and thought that the quality of his goods was being
challenged. From this example, we can see the difference between Saudi and Australian
cultures and also the different meaning given to the words ‘is it good’ (language). In Saudi
Arabia and some other Arabic countries, this means that the product is of high quality, while
in some other communities or cultures it may not mean anything or it may mean something
else. Thus, meaning gives us a sense of identity, like who we are and with whom we belong.
Meaning is produced and exchanged in every social and personal interaction through the use
of language.
 38

3.9 Assessment Questions

1. Define in detail the complex phenomena of ‘Identity’ in Language and Culture Studies.

2. Discuss the relation between ‘Identity’ and culture in the background of the eighteenth

century concept of identity.

3. Describe how identity is constructed via language in a particular culture?

4. Explain how Ideology is involved in creating identity?

5. Explain in detail with appropriate examples the significance of mother tongue in

developing identity.

6. Discuss what language attitude is? and how does it impact the construction of an image

of the self and others?

7. What is representation? How does culture form an essential part of it?

8. Discuss representation in relation to language, culture and identity?

9. How are culture and identity represented through language?

 39

Unit 4

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND GENDER

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By : Ms Fatima Nagrah
 40

4. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide a detailed discussion of how language and culture
help in the construction of gender. While doing so, the focus is mainly on defining what is
meant by the term gender, social construction of gender, gendered language and the relation
between gender and power. Moreover, it will also present a comprehensive account of different
approaches towards language and gender. For this unit, the following are the learning
objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define in detail the phenomena of ‘gender’.

2. Understand how gender is constructed via language in a particular culture.

3. Explain the relationship among the aspects of language, gender and power.

4. Understand the various approaches towards gendered language.

 41

4.1 Gender

Gender represents the cultural understanding of the biological differences among males and
females. It also refers to the socio-cultural and psychological shaping, patterning and
evaluation of male and female behavior. Other than the biological differences between males
and females there is gender stratification as well which is briefly explained below.

4.2 Gender Stratification

Gender stratification is a system where the positions occupied by men and women are
associated with different amounts of income, prestige, agriculture, education, politics, etc.
Gender roles are defined in most cultures (which vary from society to society). For instance,
most societies based their gender stratification on the warrior nature of their men – who in turn
used their warrior and economic roles to oppress women like in the Javanese society. This
stratification is mostly prominent in the public and political realms where men are actively
involved and women engage in economic chores at home as in most African countries. But
since societies are dynamic gender system remains flexible and keeps on changing. So the more
advanced and developed a society is the narrower and more neutralized is its gender
stratification.

4.3 Language and Gender

The relationship between language and gender has been the focus of many disciplines such as
linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, biology, etc. Each discipline has
explored a certain aspect of this topic: biology and psychology-based studies focused on
examining how language is processed in the brain and learned, sociology has looked into
gender and socialization, anthropology on how gender roles vary across cultures and linguistics
has focused on the differences in language use by men and women.
One of the main issues regarding gender is the question of ‘power’ inequality. As we will
discuss further in this unit one of the most driving forces in this area is the fact that language
cannot be separated from society; people’s habits by the way they use language create
inequalities in societies. This societal practice becomes prominent through the interplay of past
and current events. Therefore, it has been argued that metaphors and other terms that denigrate
women become a norm and create negative concepts associated with femininity when used
even unconsciously. This phenomenon also becomes evident when people use language that is
embedded with social status differences including gender hence, further aggravating and
reinforcing inequalities.
There is a general perception in societies that women are more cooperative, polite and caring
while men are more aggressive and competitive. This distinction between men and women is
not limited to the behavior but extends to their language as well - despite researches that show
other factors are also involved in the way people communicate; other elements and aspects are
associated in the conversations people have with each other. The distinction that has already
 42

been established is automatic and now deeply ingrained in many cultures and it can only be
shattered or changed if further research is conducted to destroy the stereotypical images and to
create deeper understanding of how people use language to ‘construct gender’. This brings us
to the concept of gender construction and we shall now further delve into how gender is
constructed in light of the cultural background and expressed through language.

4.4 Language and Gender Construction

The relationship between language and gender is not ‘natural’ but is created through culture,
because societies have different associations with different forms of language for males and
females. A lot of research concerning male and female speech proved that certain linguistic
features are associated with either men or women only. Generally, in most societies’ women
are expected to speak more formally and more politely than men. Femaleness is associated
with respectability, gentility and high-cultured, contrary to manliness which is associated with
‘toughness’ and direct speech. These behaviours that society expects from the male and female
predetermine their choice of words (language).
Women’s speech has been described by a number of scholars as being different from men. The
difference between women and men also includes the biological factor; women have certain
distinctive biological traits than men e.g. they weigh less, mature quickly, live longer, are less
strong and have lesser number of muscles. Furthermore, the voice quality of both men and
women is different; women have thinner vocal chords while men have thicker. As a result,
women have high pitches while men have lower. However, these differences are there because
of certain other factors like the social one; women live longer because of the roles they play in
the society and different jobs they have. The voice quality is also based on the social
understanding of women’s role and how they should behave and speak in different social
settings.

4.4.1 Difference in Communication Process

Different investigations and studies conducted on the language use by both men and women
especially in the process of communication show that:
➢ Men’s conversations revolve mostly around business, politics, legal matters, taxes and
sports while women talk about social life, books, food and drinks, life’s troubles and
lifestyles.

➢ Men speak forcefully; their voices show command and authority while female speech
tends to be more polite or submissive in some situations and is usually less forceful.

➢ Men talk focuses on competition, teasing, aggression, violence (in some cases), they
take initiatives in conversations and tend to explain things to women. Men do not
hesitate to interrupt, challenge, ignore and take control in a conversation and because
of this they end up dominating most conversations and their social interactions.
 43

➢ Women talk about feelings, affiliations with home and family or others, they ask more
questions than men and apologize more; their conversations are dominated more than
they dominate.

➢ Women use more question tags and hyper-correct pronunciations and grammar; they
doubt more on what they say and not just what they hear. Certain clichés like ‘men
never listen’ and ‘women find it easier to express their feelings’ support the above
findings.

4.4.2 Linguistic Differences

Further investigations show that there are phonological, phonetics, morphological, syntactic
and pragmatics (linguistics) differences in the male and female speech. These speech
differences have been noted in a variety of languages. For instance,:
➢ In Gross Ventre, an Ameridian language of the North East United States, women have
palatalized velar stops where men have palatalized dental stops. An example is ‘bread’
which females pronounce it as ‘kjatsa’ whiles males pronounce it asdjatsa. Moreover,
Yukaghir a North East Asian language, women and children used /ts/ and /dz/ whereas
men have /tj/ and /dj/. Syntactically, in terms choice of words, Japanese women use
‘ne’ at the end of sentence when they speak.

➢ English, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, Spanish and many more languages make
gender distinction through their pronominal systems. For example, ‘he’ and ‘she’ in
English, ‘le’ and ‘la’ in French, ‘hun’ and ‘han’ in Norwegian language. Nevertheless,
among the Akan’s gender distinction exists between male and female personal names.
For example, a male child born on Friday in Akan will be called ‘Kofi’ whiles a female
child born on the same Friday will be called ‘Afia’.

➢ With the family names, a lot of male names also have their corresponding female names
in most Ghanaian societies. For example, in Akan by attaching the suffix –waa, -maa,
-bea, or –ba to the male name we have its female counterpart. Few examples are
illustrated below:

Male names Female names

Ampofo Ampofowaa
Kyei Kyeiwaa
Antwi Antwiwaa
Ado Adobea
Ofei Ofeibea
Table 2 Akan male names with female counterparts

These distinctions of names can also be seen in many western countries as well. For example,
Alexander/Alexandra, Andrew/Andrea, Charlie/Charlotte, Felix/Felicity etc.
 44

Activity: Keeping in mind the Akan names given above make a list
of names from the Pakistani context of males with their female
counterparts.

➢ The interface between language and gender is also seen in our in African setting
particularly, in Ghanaian society certain diction may be acceptable for male but may
not be appropriate for female. Profanity does not deem suitable for females but may be
not be frown upon when same profane words are uttered by their male counterpart.
Ghanaian Pidgin English according to many researches is male dominated in Ghana.

➢ Furthermore, archaism, proverbs and many figurative devices are used by more men
than women. Another instance is in Dyirbal, certain variety may be a taboo to women
while to the men it is not. In Ghanaian context certain important communicative
situations and performances where aspects of oral literature and performance are
gender sensitive. For example women perform funeral dirge, marriage contracts and
folksongs while males act as orators and linguists and narrators of travels.

➢ The different speech styles, distinction in names, different choice of words and gender
sensitive performances of some genre among male and female across society are due to
the role the various societies assigned to the different sexes and expect them to behave.
The various roles allocated by the society to the different sexes are executed using
language because, it is through language (words, sayings, songs, jokes, stories and
poetry etc.) that we construct gender and a connection between language and gender.

4.5 Language Gender and Power

Power is often demonstrated and established through language, it is also reinforced through
language. Power is not limited to a certain authority or setting; it varies and has many types.
For instance, in a political context power is achieved through speeches and debates. The words
that are used, the vocabulary and the extra-linguistic features such as pitch, tone, volume, etc
play a great role in establishing power and authority. Legal power has its own codification;
orders and commands are passed through language and established with it. Having said this, it
should also be made clear that power is not only established in public domains but also at
homes. Each household has a different description of power and how it is inculcated in its
members.
Societies through their practices of certain roles including oral and traditional customs,
institutional powers and pre-determines gender roles and norms establish power. These
practices and division of gender roles seek to control both the sexes. As a result, institutional
conflicts arise about the authority; who will speak and to what effect, limitations to gender
voices and how these voices should be raised. Moreover, the control of representation takes
place in social, institutions and in verbal interaction about how to communicate, display and
 45

reproduce equally. This is a source of social power that is established through control and as a
result gender variation in language behavior becomes apparent.
In most societies men tend to control and dominate women while women struggle to
emancipate. These dominance and emancipation are observed in our daily activities, jobs,
naming, proverbs, idioms etc. which are all expressed using language. Therefore, the more
power you have, the more language you can use.
In most Asian and African societies, key political and traditional portfolios that are strictly
related to communication is usually male-dominated. These include positions of chiefs, lineage
head, counsellors, diplomats, chiefs spoke person, etc. There is no doubt that the verbal wit of
women is directly or indirectly limited.
In addition, to demonstrate that certain positions or jobs are male dominant and controlled by
men in most societies, women holding such positions are often described re-emphasising their
feminine forms in terms of men. For example, a woman who is a judge, chairs a program or is
a doctor would be referred to mostly in our daily conversations as female judge, madam
chairman, lady doctor respectively.
Furthermore, power in terms of dominance is seen in naming after marriage, women tends to
take their husband’s names in addition to their names after marriage just as children are given
their fathers’ names in addition to their first names. The marital status of a woman is easily
known with ‘miss’ or ‘Mrs’ attached to her name but that of a man is not easily detected. ‘Mr.
‘is used for both married and unmarried man (i.e. any grown man, marital status irrelevant).
There has been an increased emphasis on the importance of analyzing language and gender
within the community or society where it is spoken as each language has particular
conventions, expectations and rules to which every speaker is expected to adhere. The inclusion
of the concepts of ‘culture’ or ‘communities of practice’ in the research is one of the most
important developments in the last years. It is particularly important to acknowledge that
gender cannot be analyzed as an independent factor. Similarly, significant is that gender might
not have the same meaning in different communities. This shift is particularly important as it
promises to change the prevailing Western bias often found in such research.

4.6 Different Approaches of Language and Gender

Research on language, gender, and culture takes three broad approaches. One is the text
analysis of linguistic resources such as the use of metaphors that reflect how men and women
are portrayed (represented in a certain society). It includes the study of, for example, terms of
address, professions, and metaphors that show gender stereotypes (traditional understanding of
both genders). In general, it appears that in most cultures men are presented positively or as the
norm, whereas females are represented negatively or as a unique and absurd entity. In the Thai
and Japanese languages women are portrayed as weak, emotional, and stupid. Whereas, in
metaphors they are regarded as a commodity and are dehumanized (considered objects with no
feelings or emotions or simply objectified).
 46

The second approach focuses on the linguistic features of many languages in the world that
have designated semantic, pragmatic, or lexical elements for the exclusive use by female or
male speakers. These languages include Japanese, Thai, Atayal, a number of Australian
Aboriginal languages and some American languages. Other anthropological–linguistic studies
focus on the relationship between language and roles. In some societies, there is a diglossic
(blend of two dialects) or bilingual situation where men and women use different language
registers (particular language) while in others, separate languages are used by men and women
according to the role they are performing.
The third approach has focused on how conversation or oral communication is conducted with
a focus on turn-taking in same and mixed gender conversations. Some of the most influential
works argued that women send more backchannels, known as minimal responses (use lesser
words), and are more cooperative than men, while men use interruptions and other features to
dominate the interaction. It was concluded that women are politer than men, and consequently
many studies on women’s language are specifically engaged in the area of politeness. These
studies have generated three different theories that are used to explain the relationship between
gender and language that will be discussed later. The next section will examine in detail how
these studies have shaped our perception of the link between gender, language, and culture.

4.7 Theoretical Perspectives

There is a deep relationship between language, gender and power. Women speak differently
from men and that women’s way of speaking expresses powerlessness. Women’s way of
speaking reflects and produces a subordinate (dominated) position in a society. Moreover,
women’s language is filled with devices as mitigators (to lessen the severity), for example
‘sort of’ and ‘I think’ and inessential qualifiers such as ‘really happy’ and ‘so beautiful’.
Language is fundamental to gender inequality and this can be found in the way in which
language is used about women and the way women use language. The way society expects
women to speak makes women speech uncertain, powerless and insignificant. In other words,
the pressure of societal expectations influences women so much that their speech reflects
doubts and submissiveness or their helplessness which ends up leaving their voices either
unheard or of no severe importance.
Given below are some claims that theorists have made regarding language used by women:
➢ Hedge: using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”, “it seems like”, and so on.

➢ Use (super) polite forms: “Would you mind...”,“I'd appreciate it if...”, “...if you don't

mind”.

➢ Use tag questions: “You're going to dinner, aren't you?”

➢ Speak in italics: intonational emphasis equal to underlining words - so, very, quite.

➢ Use empty adjectives: divine, lovely, adorable, and so on

 47

➢ Use hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation: English prestige grammar and

clearenunciation.

➢ Use direct quotation: men paraphrase more often.

➢ Have a special lexicon: women use more words for things like colors, men for sports.

➢ Use question intonation in declarative statements: women make declarative statements

into questions by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of a statement, expressing

uncertainty. For example, “What school do you attend? Eton College?”

➢ Use “wh-” imperatives: (such as, “Why don't you open the door?”)

➢ Speak less frequently

➢ Overuse qualifiers: (for example, “I think that...”)

➢ Apologize more: (for instance, “I'm sorry, but I think that...”)

➢ Use modal constructions: (such as can, would, should, ought - “Should we turn up the

heat?”)

➢ Avoid coarse language or expletives

➢ Use indirect commands and requests: (for example, “My, isn't it cold in here?” - really

a request to turn the heat on or close a window)

➢ Use more intensifiers: especially so and very (for instance, “I am so glad you came!”)

➢ Lack a sense of humor: women do not tell jokes well and often don't understand the

punch line of jokes.

These societal prescribed speeches disqualify women from position of power and authority.
That is to say, women are deprived of their rightful standing in a society and their voices are
deemed less important. With that, language becomes a tool of oppression which is imposed on
women by societal norms and thus, keeps women in their place. Lakoff claims women and men
talk differently and the differences in their speech are the support of the male dominance. Her
claim brought about the difference and dominant approaches.

4.7.1 The Dominance Approach

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Robin Lakoff 1975 proposed the dominance approach stating that men are naturally more
dominant than women mainly through speech patterns or behaviour towards or around women.
In her other theories of Tag questions, however, the dominance approach also shows that
women act less dominant around men, in that, women use tag questions more than
men not only for politeness but uncertain whether they are correct and needed a male
opinion to ascertain their view points. Women are known for using more tag questions than
men since men naturally act dominant around the women. Consequently, to make the women
conversation viable, she requires a male reassurance or idea. The difference in style of speech
between the two sexes results from male supremacy and gives rise or space to patriarchy.
According to the dominance theories, men and women inhabit the same cultural and linguistic
world, in which power and status are distributed unequally, and are expressed by linguistic as
well as other cultural markers. In principle, women and men have access to the same set of
linguistic and conversational devices and use them for the same purposes. Apparent
differences in usage reflect differences in status and in goals. Analysis related with dominance
framework usually argue that differences between women and men’s speech a rise because of
male dominance over women and persist in order to keep women subordinated to men

4.7.2 The Deficit Approach

The deficit approach was characteristic of the earliest work in the field. Most well-known is
Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place, which claims to establish something called ‘women’s
language’ (WL), which is characterised by linguistic forms such as hedges, ‘empty’ adjectives
like charming, divine, nice, and ‘talking in italics’ (exaggerated intonation contours). WL is
described as weak and unassertive, in other words, as deficient. Implicitly, WL is deficient by
comparison with the norm of male language. This approach was challenged because of the
implication that there was something intrinsically wrong with women’s language, and that
women should learn to speak like men if they wanted to be taken seriously.

4.7.3 Difference Approach

Deborah Tannen is well known to the Difference approach. She publicised that male and female
individuals’ lifestyles are often presented as being different cultures. Thus, men and women
inhabit different cultural (and therefore linguistic) worlds. Even if they grow up in the same
neighbourhood, on the same block, or in the same house, girls and boys grow up in different
worlds of words. Others talk to them differently and expect and accept different ways of talking
from them. She categorized this theory into the following:
➢ Status verses Support – men gain status through their speech and the way they
communicate generally makes them appear to be more powerful and dominant in a
society while women use their speech to comfort and support others.

➢ Advices verses Understanding – whereas, men will try to find a solution to the problem,
women seek to find comfort and sympathy for their problems.
 49

➢ Information verses Feeling – men’s conversation is message-oriented communicating

or taking information, whereas, women conversation focuses on building relationships
and strengthening social connections.

➢ Orders verses Proposals – Men like to use direct imperatives (example; “shut the door”)
when communicating. However, Women conversations are full of super polite forms
(example; “would you mind if …?”).

➢ Conflict verses Compromise – While, men would not mind having conflict to show
their power, most women try to avoid conflict as much as possible and try to
compromise situations.

➢ Independence verses Intimacy– according to the theory, men want to be independence

whereas, women like to seek intimacy in general.
Tannen stresses on the idea, that difference is an approach of equality and varying
communicative styles of men and women are a direct consequence of considering men and
women a part of different ‘sub cultures’ as they have been socialized and brought up to do so
since childhood. The gender differences in language are associated with cultural differences
comparing conversational goals; what the speaker intends to achieve through their speech. She
further elaborates that men’s communication style is more a ‘report’ aiming to deliver and
convey factual information while women usually use ‘rapport style’ targeted on building and
maintaining relationships.

4.7.4 The Dynamic Approach

The fourth and most recent approach is called the dynamic approach because there is an
emphasis on dynamic aspects of interaction. Gender identity is seen as a social construct rather
than as a ‘given’ social category. Speakers should be seen as ‘doing gender’ rather than
statically ‘being’ a particular gender. It is claimed that gender should be conceptualised as a
verb, not a noun! The observant reader will notice that the phrase ‘doing gender’ was also used
in the paragraph on the dominance approach. This is because the four approaches do not have
rigid boundaries: researchers may be influenced by more than one theoretical perspective. What
has changed is linguists’ sense that gender is not a static, add-on characteristic of speakers, but
is something that is accomplished in talk every time we speak.

4.8 Language and Gender in Education

A great deal of research on language, gender, and education has been concerned to document
differences and inequalities in girls’ and boys’ language behavior. Girls and boys were
observed to have different speaking styles, they made different reading choices, they wrote in
different ways and about different topics. But boys’ speaking styles allowed them to dominate
classroom interaction so that girls had limited opportunities to contribute; books and other
resources used in schools contained many more male than female characters and examples;
 50

male characters in stories were more active and had less restricted roles than female characters;
information books often neglected women’s and girls’ experiences and contributions to society;
even in literacy, an area associated with high achievement amongst girls, there were arguments
that girls’ success in school did not help them – and in certain respects hindered them – in
doing well outside school, and particularly in gaining high-status careers. ‘Equal opportunities’
initiatives, designed to counteract such imbalances and inequalities, have included encouraging
girls to contribute more in class discussions, encouraging more collaborative talk between
students, introducing books/resources containing less stereotyped images, and broadening the
range of reading and writing carried out by girls and boys.

4.9 Language and Gender in Media

Media, language and gender have long been the focus of interest for research scholars in the
West. Women representation and their role in news and other mass media has been the subject
of research over the last 25 years. Studies have shown how language became a tool in creating
an image of a person being powerless and has the capability to establish and sustain the power
relations in a society. Previous researches included investigation of language use in terms of
convention of naming, titles, terms of address and vocabulary lacking equivalence, use of
generic ‘he’ and ‘man’ to disregard females and semantic derogation of the terms related to
females more often than those of males. These findings are positively relevant to the study of
gender in print media.
Different forms of media have the power to construct, represent and convey gender. There is a
connection between media and working life. Female politician’s achievements are trivialized
as they usually take less coverage than their appearance An analysis of the UK newspapers and
official government websites showed that media constructions ignore the contribution of
female politicians. Research on women athletes exhibits issues of under-representation, an
emphasis on femininity and negative aspects and focusing on their physical appearance more
than of their competence. Furthermore, sports is considered to be male domain. Similarly, in
the field of business, the way of representation remains the same. Women as business
executives receive similar reporting as she does in other genres. A critical discourse analysis
of the American business press displayed the image of women executives quite fractured as
compared to their male counterpart.
A similar representation of women was observed in crime reporting. Despite the seriousness
of genre, studies found a gender-specific reporting. An analysis of headlines of crime reports
of Pakistani newspapers and their findings supported the prevalent scenario. Women victims
have no self-identity as they were labeled as ‘women’, ‘mothers’, ‘wives’, ‘brides’ and
reference to their age and marital status was made reporting the news.
One of the main issues in the current research on language and gender is the distribution of
power among genders. The focus on gender differences in society originated because of the
fact that, almost universally, women have been and are socially disadvantaged. That inequality,
many scholars argue, is manifested in language use, whether that is in the way that women are
represented; how women speak; or the choices that they make from among many varieties of
the language that are available to them.
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4.10 Assessment Questions

1. Define in detail the phenomena of ‘gender’.

2. Describe how ‘gender’ is constructed via language in a particular culture.

3. Discus the relationship among the aspects of language, gender and power.

4. Differentiate amongst the four different approaches towards ‘gendered’ language.

5. How are extra-linguistic features involved in establishing power?

6. How different communicative styles represent the variation in ‘genders’?

7. What is the role of media in the establishing power roles of ‘genders’?

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Unit 5

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND POLITENESS

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By :Ms Fatima Nagrah
 53

5. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide a detailed discussion the phenomenon of
politeness in language that is different in different cultures. This unit focusses on defining
what is meant by the term politeness, discuss and identify the many types of politeness
strategies that users employ during the process of talking. For a detailed understanding of the
phenomenon, it also presents the politeness maxims given forth by Geoffery Leech that form
the underlying principal for users of language. Politeness principles are adhered to by
individuals in a social setup to develop effective communicative relations with other
individuals for which the concept of ‘face’ needs to be known by language users. This unit also
talks about the two different types of face, namely positive and negative face wants of peoples.
It finally ends by explaining how politeness strategies may vary across cultures.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define in detail the phenomena of ‘politeness’ in language and culture.

2. Identify the types of politeness used by individuals.

3. Recognize the principles of politeness.

4. Understand what is ‘face’ and its types.

5. Understand the cross-cultural aspect of politeness.

 54

5.1 What Is Politeness?

Just like language is claimed to be the trait that distinguishes humans from other species,
politeness is the feature of language use that clearly demonstrates the nature of human sociality
as expressed in speech. Politeness is strictly about considering other people’s feelings when
interacting with them and how they should be treated; the overall behavior during interaction
towards others concerning their relationship and social status. In a broader sense, it can be said
that speech associated with an individual’s public image or ‘face’ is a part of language use. On
the whole considering other people’s feelings means to keep a check and balance on what to
say and what not to say thus, forming an indirect source for people to frame their
communicative intentions.

5.2 Illustrating Politeness

In our daily lives, we have the awareness of what is polite and what is not. For instance, to
offer your seat to elderly on a bus is considered polite behavior and to interrupt when someone
is talking is considered impolite behaviour; to greet someone when you meet in the morning is
polite and to stand up to reach for the dish you want at a dinner table is impolite. So first of all
based on this explanation, it can be deduced that politeness is observable and a social
phenomenon i.e. related to people and their interactions with other people. Then, in terms of a
means-and-end analysis, politeness is readily understood by means. We well know that in being
polite we have an end to achieve. The most common example is that whenever we want
someone to do us a favor we must make the request in a polite manner. We say “hello! ”, to
someone, or to shake hands with him, or send him a card on the occasion of Spring festival, or
to give him a birthday gift or pat him on the shoulder—all this we do in order to show our good
feelings, our friendliness and our intention to maintain harmonious relationships with him. In
general, we act politely in order to show our wishes to start a friendly relation with someone,
or to maintain it if it is already existing, or to mend it if it is being threatened for some reasons.
To maintain the kind of smooth, harmonious interpersonal relationships called for by any
human community, politeness serves as a ready means (a way through which the said goals can
be achieved).
Politeness is also considered to be a limitation apart from being a means to an end (way to
achieve a goal); like a social norm imposed by the community we are a part of. Sometimes we
feel that have to be polite in order to show that we are civilized and refined in such a way that
we know what to do to fit the conventional standards of society so that we are not deemed rude
or ill-mannered and impolite. This takes us to the idea of tolerance, because in order to be polite
we have to be tolerant; under certain circumstances, to meet certain standards we must control
ourselves to behave or act in a way that we would have readily done in private.
To sum up, politeness can be understood as social phenomenon, a norm and a means to achieve
good interpersonal relationships. Hence, it is phenomenal, instrumental and normative
(pertaining to a certain standard) by nature. However, in many ways politeness is universal;
can be observed in different cultures across the world – speakers of different languages use it
 55

differently to achieve their set goals and in turn making it a norm for their particular cultures
and social settings.

5.3 Politeness Principles

Leech has given some principles (also known as maxims) of politeness that can be used by
speakers of language. Given below are Leech’s six criteria of politeness:
1. Tact-maxim: Minimize the cost to other; maximize the benefit to other.

2. Generosity maxim: minimise benefit to self, maximise cost to self.

3. Approbation maxim: minimise dispraise of other, maximise praise of other.

4. Modesty maxim : minimise praise of self, maximize dispraise of self.

5. Agreement maxim : minimise disagreement between self and other, maximise

agreement between self and other.

6. Sympathy maxim: minimise antipathy between self and other, maximise sympathy
between self and other.

Activity: Can you think of at least 2 examples each of the politeness maxims discussed
here?

5.4 Politeness versus Indirectness

The idea that politeness is rather an indirect concept has attracted many scholars working on
understanding politeness. Some argue that politeness is not observed in indirect means only
considering that there are researches about how indirectness is not always evaluated as
politeness. In order to further understand this idea, politeness is mostly defined as a balance
between two needs; the need for pragmatic clarity and the need to avoid coerciveness i.e. to
not be forced into doing something. However, too much pragmatic clarity or too much
coerciveness decreases politeness giving direct messages thought to be polite because they
indicate a lack of concern with visible non-verbal modes i.e. people are not bothered enough
to remain polite or hide their expressions.

5.5 Impoliteness

Applying this concept to our current discussion on politeness, one way to categorize and
understand what is politeness, is to see it in comparison with what it is not. Thus, when we
 56

understand the antonyms and opposites of politeness i.e. rudeness, crudeness, vulgarity,
discourtesy, and impoliteness we will gain a better insight to what politeness actually means.
A little bit of research has talked about impoliteness, trying to separate it from impoliteness to
clear the boundaries between the two. Impoliteness is defined as a behavior that makes way for
aggression and awkwardness in a particular context. Some say that impoliteness is rooted in
the hearer’s understanding of the speaker’s intentions and the context.
Impoliteness is linked with power; it is an exercise of power and as it is said that there is no
interaction without power it influences the way people address each other and how they come
to interact in general - effecting the social environment. Impoliteness and power are inseparable
because a speaker who is affected by an utterance finds it hard to control his or her responses
or the way he/she must respond. In addition to this, those in positions of power have been found
to exercise impoliteness more than the ones who have/had no or less power.
Distinctions between ‘impoliteness’ and ‘rudeness’ are still a matter of debate between
scholars, with disagreement over whether the two terms mean the same thing or not. Some
consider their ideas more appropriate than others and not limited to just the one on the receiving
end of the communication behavior.
Over-politeness is marked as inappropriate behavior as close to impoliteness and rudeness, it
is easy to mark such behavior because inappropriateness in social settings and interactions does
not go unnoticed unlike appropriateness. Over-politeness is understood to be beyond the
boundary of appropriateness and inappropriateness and is simply negative. This does not go
without saying that it is observed, marked and understood to be inappropriate on the part of the
hearer i.e. taken from the hearer’s perspective. Thus, over-politeness falls into several
categories when understood from different perspectives; of hearer and speaker, of intentional
and unintentional behavior and so on.

5.6 Politeness and Culture

Several researchers have brought to light that ‘face concerns’ are cultural specific. Some works
consider ‘face’ as rational and ‘interactional’ rather than an individual phenomenon. This
means that the social self (how individuals appear to be) or ‘face’ is achieved in relationships
with others through interaction. In simple words, we can say that face is considered to be the
appearance of an individual in a social setting, how people meet and see an individual. As a
result, the labels of ‘negative face’ or ‘positive face’ are attached to the individuals on the basis
of the connection, tension, and separation among them.

5.7 Face and Politeness

Face—a person’s public self-image—has been a key topic in politeness research. The concept
of ‘Face work’ refers to the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent
with face (public image). It includes a wide variety of practices, including corrective face-work
and avoidance face-work. Universalist theories of politeness gave pre-eminence to these
 57

(corrective and avoidance) forms of face-work, but in doing so excluded many other aspects of
face-work.
Face and politeness are strongly interrelated phenomena, in the sense that any act of
impoliteness is a direct threat to the face of a person. Lets look the following example:
CHRIS: Well, can I please wear something else?
JULIUS: As long as I don’t have to pay for it.
ROCHELLE: Just find something to wear and I’ll take a look at it, okay?
CHRIS: I don’t have anything special.
JULIUS: When I was a kid we didn’t need any special clothes. Just having clothes was
special.
NARRATOR: The only way I was going to get my mom to spend money on me was if not
doing it would embarrass her.
CHRIS: Mom, I’m the only black kid in the whole school. They already think I’m a
crack baby. Wearing this sweater they’ll probably think we’re on welfare.
ROCHELLE: Who said we were on welfare? Be home from school on time tomorrow.
We’re gonna go shopping.
JULIUS: I thought you said we didn’t have the money?
ROCHELLE: Oh, I’ll get it. Not havin’ people think we on welfare.
(Excerpt taken from: “Everybody Hates Picture Day,” Everybody Hates Chris, Season
1, Episode 13, 2006)

This interaction is cited from the American comedy series Everybody Hates Chris. Here, Chris
is trying to convince his parents, Rochelle and Julius, to buy some new clothes for him to wear
to the school picture day. After pleading to wear something other than what his mother has
picked out, his father indicates that he is not allowed to buy anything new. His mother suggests
that he find something else (i.e., that he already owns or can borrow from his brother). It is at
this point that the narrator (the grown-up version of Chris) comes up with a strategy, namely,
talking about the potential embarrassment, or threat to his family’s and thus his mother’s face,
if people were to think they are too poor to buy new clothes. Rochelle reacts strongly to this
potential face threatand decides they will buy new clothes for Chris in spite of protests from
Julius. However, despite the obvious salience of face in this interaction, it is quite clear that
evaluations of politeness (or impoliteness) are not at issue here. Rochelle does not decide to
get new clothes for Chris because it would be polite to do so, but because she wants to avoid
having others think badly of their family. In other words, she wants to protect their face.

5.7.1 Face Types

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We have talked about the concept of face, facework and how an individuals’ face can be
threatened by other individual and how individuals try to safeguard their face from others. At
this point the most pertinent question that arises is that how many types of face does an
individual have and how can they be safeguarded? Let us look at these types.
There are two types of face, namely:
➢ Positive Face
➢ Negative Face
Positive Face reflects an individual's need for his or her wishes and desires to be appreciated
in a social context. This is the maintenance of a positive and consistent self-image. Whereas,
negative face reflects an individual's need for freedom of action, freedom from imposition, and
the right to make one's own decisions. Together, these types of face respect an individual's face
needs for autonomy and competence. Now let us look at the types of politeness that have been
given by scholars.

5.8 Types of Politeness

Politeness has been studies to be of three types, namely:

➢ Positive Politeness

➢ Negative Politeness

➢ Bald-off Record Politeness

5.8.1 Positive Politeness

In positive politeness, the speaker's goal is to address the positive face needs of the hearer, thus
enhancing the hearer's positive face. This is also known as positive face redress i.e.
compensation for the hearer. Positive politeness strategies highlight friendliness and
camaraderie (loyalty) between the speaker and hearer; the speaker's wants are in some way
similar to the hearer's wants. There are many ways to accomplish this familiarity and claim
common ground. First, the speaker can notice and attend to the hearer's wants, interests, needs,
or goods. Second, the speaker can exaggerate his/her interest, approval or sympathy with the
hearer. Third, the speaker can demonstrate an intensified interest to the hearer. The speaker can
also use in-group markers, which demonstrate that both the speaker and hearer belong to the
same social group, such as a work culture or religious affiliation. These can include forms of
address, use of in-group language or dialect, use of jargon or slang, and linguistic contractions.
For example:
➢ "Dude, you know…"

➢ "Brother, I'd like to discuss with you…"

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The speaker can also seek agreement with the hearer by choosing safe topics and using
repetition. On the flip side of that, the speaker can also seek to avoid disagreement with the
hearer by employing a token agreement, a pseudo-agreement, a white lie, or hedging an
opinion. Further, the speaker can presuppose knowledge of the hearer's wants and attitudes,
presuppose the hearer's values are the same as the speaker's values, presuppose familiarity in
the speaker-hearer relationship, and presuppose the hearer's knowledge on the topic. Another
strategy to invoke familiarity between speaker and hearer is to use humor/joking. In addition
to claiming common ground, the speaker can use some tools to convey that the speaker and
hearer are cooperators. These include asserting or presupposing the speaker's knowledge of,
and concern for, the hearer's wants, offering or promising, being optimistic, including both
speaker and hearer in a target activity, giving or asking for reasons, and assuming or asserting
reciprocity. Finally, in an effort to establish positive politeness, the speaker can seek to fulfill
the hearer's wants in some way. This can be induced through gift-giving, though these gifts can
be material objects, as well as sympathy, understanding, or cooperation.
Examples of positive politeness include compliments, and might also include statements such
as:
➢ "I really like the way you've done this."

➢ "It took me forever to figure this out, but what I eventually came to was…"

➢ "You know it's always important to me to do the best job I can, and I know the same is

true for you. That's why I think we should pay attention to this piece a little."

➢ "I really like the way you approach this here. I think this other part might be a little

stronger with a similar approach."

In many of these cases, the speaker is bringing their own perspectives into the equation within
his or her suggestions to the hearer; in this way, the speaker is emphasizing similarity and
familiarity with the hearer and the content under discussion.

5.8.2 Negative Politeness

Where positive politeness enhances the hearer's positive and consistent self-image through
recognizing the hearer's need for his or her wishes and desires to be appreciated
socially, negative politeness addresses the hearer's need for freedom of action and freedom
from imposition in making his or her own decisions. This is also known as negative face
redress. The first approach to negative politeness is to be direct by being conventionally
indirect. A second approach is to not assume or presume. These strategies include questions
and hedges. (A hedge is a "softening" of a statement by employing less-than-certain phrasing
such as perhaps, might, can, or could.) Third, negative politeness can be employed by not
coercing the hearer. This can be accomplished by:
A. Being pessimistic, such as:
➢ "I'm sure you won't want to do this…"
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B. Minimizing the imposition, such as:

➢ “It's a small thing I need…"

C. Giving deference, such as:

➢ "you know much more about this than I do…"
The speaker can also communicate his/her desire to not impose on the hearer. This can be
accomplished through apologizing strategies that include
D. Admitting the impositionsuch as:
➢ "I know this is a big deal…"

E. Indicating reluctance, such as:

➢ "I hate to ask this…"

Moreover, it includes giving overwhelming reasons for having to ask, or begging forgiveness.
Further efforts to not impose on the hearer include impersonalizing the speaker and hearer.
This strategy include:
F. using passive and circumstantial voices, such as:
➢ "It's generally done this way…"
Here, replacing "I" and "you" with indefinites, such as:
➢ "people tend to…"
And pluralizing "I" and "you" and avoiding use of "I" and "you" all together, such as in:
➢ "We don't always know what we're up against…"

➢ "some people might approach the situation in this way,"

➢ "I think I might do it differently, but of course whatever you think is best,"

➢ "I don't know a lot about this but it seems that this approach might be

reasonable and the situation"

➢ "I know you know a lot more about this than I do, but it seems to me…"

In these examples, the speaker is recognizing and addressing the hearer's right to make his or
her own decisions freely, thus attending to the hearer's negative face needs.

5.8.3 Off-record politeness

Off-record politeness is a politeness strategy that relies upon implication. This strategy is very
indirect and involves the breaking of conversational norms to imply a particular recommended
course of action. Here, the speaker is relying upon the hearer's ability to decipher and interpret
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the speaker's intended meaning, although it is indirectly suggested. Off-record politeness is

accomplished in a couple of ways with several strategies for each. First, the speaker can invite
conversational implicatures. Strategies here are to give hints, give clues of association,
presuppose, understate, overstate, use tautologies, use contradictions, be ironic, use metaphors,
and use rhetorical questions. Secondly, the speaker can be intentionally vague or ambiguous,
also over-generalizing, displacing the hearer, and being incomplete by using ellipsis. Examples
might include the following exchanges:

A) "What do you think about these pants?"

B) "I think you have a lot of very nice clothes in your closet, especially pants."
A) "Do you think we should leave at 7 or 7:30?"
B) "I think your sister is a stickler for punctuality."
A) "I think I'd like to watch the football game."
B) "Yes, a little violent aggression is a good way to spend a Monday night."
In each of these scenarios, speaker B is offering a suggestion to speaker A. Speaker B's intended
meaning may or may not be clear to you as you read through this, but hopefully, given the
context and their relationship, speaker A will understand the implications offered by speaker
B. The risk in off-record politeness, of course, is that the implications are so vague they are not
understood as intended. Such is the nature of off-record politeness.

5.8.4 Cross-Cultural Politeness

When it comes to the concept of culture, it is not far-fetched to argue that politeness research
at the moment is heavily cross-cultural. Investigate the relationship between the role of culture
in the interpretation and performance of language is known as cross-cultural communication
and the politeness strategies used in various cultures is known as cross-cultural politeness. A
large number of studies have explored politeness across cultures in a comparative way. for
example, in some cultures, people only expect to give or receive thanks for acts of altruism and
not for tasks that are intrinsic to a person’s job, such as a bus driver or waiter. In other cultures,
such as the UK however, people thank others for performing any tasks that benefit them. An
example of this would be thanking the bus driver when leaving the bus.

5.8.5 Historical Politeness

History has always been prominent and present in the field throughout its development. Some
works have even gone to the extent of connecting modern norms of polite behavior with the
historical ones. While others have looked into the historical data in order to understand and
establish the credibility and validity of politeness frameworks. Since many modern practices
of politeness have roots in history, it is perhaps not to strange to argue that no theory of
politeness is complete without having some link with its historical research. Furthermore, the
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concept of historicity plays an important role in the study of the modern narrative of politeness
and mediated data such as news reports on peoples’ politeness behavior.

5.9 Politeness and Society

As discussed previously, politeness is a social phenomenon it is not surprising to see various

social variables getting attention in the field - variables such as age and social class. However,
the most broadly studied social variable in the field has been gender, which has been studied
since the formation of politeness research. Politeness studies approach gender and politeness
in categorical ways, by clearly distinguishing masculine and feminine forms of politeness
behavior (see unit 4) while such research reflects a stereotypical and overgeneralized view of
gendered language, it is important to emphasize that politeness research at the time followed
broader trends in gender and language research.

5.10 Assessment Questions

1. How important is ‘politeness’ in communication?

2. How many types of politeness have been identified so far?

3. Keeping in view the politeness principles, indicate how polite are you?

4. Does the culture you live in adhere to the principles of politeness? How do you think

this situation can be changed?

5. Define what you understand by ‘face’ and give a few examples of face threatening acts

by individuals around you?

6. Is the concept of politeness similar in different cultures? Explain with examples.

7. How would you compare politeness with impoliteness?

8. Based on the concept of politeness and culture, how would you distinguish appropriate

behavior from inappropriate behavior?

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Unit 6

KINSHIP LANGUAGE

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By : Ms Fatima Nagrah
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6. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide a discussion on kinship language. While doing
so, the focus is mainly on defining kinship language, identifying kinship terms, their
background and how they are classified. Moreover, it will also discuss the lexicalized items
pertaining to kinship and how they are presented across cultures. For this unit, the following
are the learning objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define the kinship terminological system in Language and Culture.

2. Understand the background of the kinship language.

3. Understand the descent system that help identify kinship terms in a culture.

4. Develop an idea about how kinship is seen across cultures.

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6.1 Kinship Terminology

Kinship terms form a system in language; they are used to refer to individuals based on their
relationships with certain other individuals. Different societies have different kinship terms and
relations hence, using a different kinship system. For example, some languages distinguish
between consanguine and affinal uncles (i.e. the brothers of one's parents and the husbands of
the sisters of one's parents, respectively), whereas others have only one word to refer to both a
father and his brothers. In simple words, the kinship terms are described as words used to
address people in different languages or communities based on the relationships they share
with each other; the relationships are identified through these terms.

In anthropology, kinship terminology is referred to as the names applied to different categories

of kin (relationships). It is natural now that the terms and the system might seem to be limitless,
but anthropologists have also identified some common structures in different societies of the
world. Six of these systems use the criterion of classification of kin in the same generation as
“ego,” a given individual designated as the starting point in genealogical (traces of an
individual’s history) reckoning. Among these are the four terminological systems that focus on
ego’s parental generation.

6.2 Background
Historically, the systematic study of kinship terminology began with the American
ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose pioneering work, Systems of Consanguinity and
Affinity of the Human Family, was published in 1871. An important element in Morgan’s
formulation was the distinction between classificatory and descriptive systems of kinship. In a
classificatory system some collateral kin—relatives not in ego’s direct line of descent or
ancestry—are placed in the same terminological grouping as lineal kin—relatives in ego’s
direct line of descent. Classificatory systems such as that of the Iroquois designate the father
and his brother, and conversely the mother and her sister, by the same term. In many societies
with unilineal descent—that is, systems that emphasize either the mother’s or the father’s line,
but not both—ego uses one set of terms to refer to brothers, sisters, and parallel cousins (those
whose genealogical ties are traced through a related parent of the same sex, as in a father’s
brother or a mother’s sister), while another set of terms is employed for cross-cousins (the
offspring of a father’s sister or a mother’s brother). This arrangement emphasizes the fact that
cross-cousins do not belong to the lineage with ego, ego’s siblings, and ego’s parallel cousins,
thus designating marriage between cross-cousins as exogamous.

Descriptive terminology, in contrast to classificatory terminology, maintains a separation

between lineal and collateral kin; for example, mother and mother’s sister, although of the same
generation and sex, are distinguished. Descriptive systems are typically found wherever
the nuclear family operates as a relatively autonomous unit economically and socially; as a
result, they are relatively rare in ethnographic literature.

The standard European-American system of kinship uses descriptive terminology, but it also
demonstrates that the distinction between descriptive and classificatory kinship systems is not
absolute. In contemporary U.S. social organization, for example, kinship terminology
distinguishes lineal members of ego’s generation (siblings) from collateral members of ego’s
generation (cousins) but, with the exception of father, groups the men of the previous
generation together, so that mother’s brother, mother’s sister’s husband, father’s brother, and
father’s sister’s husband are all referred to by the term uncle.
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Kinship systems convey important social information but depending on the variation of the
social settings across different cultures, the cultural meanings and correct translations of
kinship terminology remain a problem. This is because largely, kinship terms are a blend of
social and genetic relatedness – thus, it cannot be claimed that two or more persons for whom
ego uses a single term are not different. Although, it is quite common for all men of ego’s
parental generation to be called by a single term (e.g., to use the same kin term for father and
uncles), nobody in such a community would confuse ego’s biological father with the other men
in that generational cohort. One method used by anthropologists to avoid bias is the
development of a precise descriptive language. For example, when a father and his brother are
referred to by the same term within a kinship system, the anthropologist may express the
position of father’s brother as “a male agnatic relative of the ascending generation.”

6.3 Kinship Terminological System

Kinship terms are words used in a speech community to identify relationships between
individuals in a family (or a kinship unit). This is also called kinship terminology. A
classification of persons related through kinship in a particular language or culture is called a
kinship system. Kinship traditionally includes terminological systems which consist of kinship
groups and relations. In linguistic anthropology, the kinship focus has been on the formal
semantic analysis of kinship terminologies with a recent addition of socio-linguistic and
comparative (ethnological) concerns based on the economic, historical and regional conditions
in social or cultural networks. The detailed and careful systematic attention to semantics had
lead it to be aware of the cultural pragmatics of kinship terms; including cultural pre-
suppositions about attitudes and behavior among kin, contexts in which kinship terms are used,
kin-relevance and the relevance of the kin groups with kin-term usage.
It is important to note that the term ‘culture’ here refers to the collective systems of
differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge on which the social life is based; interactions
and associations among different people. This idea leads us to believe that kinship offers a
useful insight into the relationship between language and culture. Furthermore, anthropologists
have studied kinship terminologies for over 150 years and established that kinfolk are important
in all cultures and all languages have kinship terminologies. These kinship terminologies share
significant definitional and structural properties while being unique from each other. This
variation among the terms and their structures makes the cultures of the speakers intriguing
and worthy of attention.
Kin terms proper are the set of words for parents, children, and spouses, such as, in English,
‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘husband’, and ‘wife’ – and words such as ‘sister’, ‘aunt’,
‘cousin’, etc., defined in terms of them (‘aunt’ is ‘mother’s’ or ‘father’s’ ‘sister’, ‘cousin’ is,
inter alia, ‘aunt’s son’, etc.) Kin terms are part of the lexicon of a language, and so any general
theory of the lexicon must apply to them. At the same time the domain has some special
characteristics that make it decidedly atypical – such as its universal parental anchor and its
rigorous relative product folk definitions. The relevance and/or status of informal variants –
e.g., terms such as ‘mama’, ‘mom’, ‘mommy’, ‘ma’, etc. – seems to depend on one’s
descriptive and analytic goals; such variants are often synonyms for less than the whole range
of the basic formal terms, and often signal attitudinal colorings.
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Conventionally, ‘ego’ (or, sometimes ‘propositus’) is used to refer to the person whose relative
is being spoken of and ‘alter’ for that relative. ‘Kintype’ refers to a particular genealogically
defined alter of ego’s (such as mother’s father’s sister’s son). The relationship is a binary one
(i.e. Joe is someone’s ‘uncle’ vs. ‘uncle’ simply labelling a referent the way that ‘chair’ does),
which can be seen as a string of (0, 1, or more) linking relatives connecting ego to alter (e.g.,
Joe is Frank’s mother’s brother); the single relationship can be examined from either
perspective by reversing ego and alter (Frank is Joe’s sister’s son, and hence ‘nephew’), and
the terms for alter in the two directions (e.g. ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’) are spoken of as
‘reciprocals’ or reciprocal terms. One term such as ‘uncle’ in our English example can have
several reciprocals – such as, here, ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’. A collateral consanguineal string runs
up from ego to the lowest ancestor shared by ego and alter and then down to alter; the shared
ancestor is spoken of as the ‘apical ancestor’, and the sibling pair immediately below the apical
ancestor in the string are spoken of as the ‘apical sibling pair’. A lineal string runs directly
down from either ego or alter to alter or ego; here, though the expression is not much used in
this situation, the apical ancestor would be the senior of the two. Affinal strings go down (from
ego or a consanguine of ego) to a marriage link and then up to alter or a consanguine of alter;
the minimal case is a direct marriage link between ego and alter.

6.4 Lexicalized Categories

"Some of the clearest examples of lexicalized categories are words used to refer to people who
are members of the same family, or kinship terms. All languages have kinship terms (e.g.
brother, mother, grandmother), but they don't all put family members into categories in the
same way. In some languages, the equivalent of the word father is 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.' That distinction isn't lexicalized in English,
but it is in other languages."

6.5 Kinship Terms in Sociolinguistics

One of the attractions that kinship systems have for investigators is that these factors are fairly
readily ascertainable. You can, therefore, relate them with considerable confidence to the actual
words that people use to describe a particular kin relationship.
There may be certain difficulties, of course. You can ask a particular person what he or she
calls others who have known relationships to that person, for example, that person’s father (Fa),
or mother’s brother (MoBr), or mother’s sister’s husband (MoSiHu), in an attempt to show
how individuals employ various terms, but without trying to specify anything concerning the
semantic composition of those terms: for example, in English, both your father’s father (FaFa)
and your mother’s father (MoFa) are called grandfather, but that term includes another term,
father. You will find, too, in English that your brother’s wife’s father (BrWiFa) cannot be
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referred to directly; brother’s wife’s father (or sister-in-law’s father) is a circumlocution rather
than the kind of term that is of interest in kinship terminology.

6.6 Kinship Symbols and Descent Systems

Kinship is reckoned in a number of different ways around the world, resulting in a variety of
types of descent patterns and kin groups. Anthropologists frequently use diagrams to illustrate
kinship relationships to make them more understandable. The symbols shown here are usually
employed. They may be combined, as in the example on the right, to represent a family
consisting of a married couple and their children. In kinship diagrams, one individual is usually
labeled as ego. This is the person to whom all kinship relationships are referred. In the case
above on the right, ego has a brother (Br), sister (Si), father (Fa), and mother (Mo). Note also
that ego is shown as being gender nonspecific--that is, either male or female.

Descent systems are divided into:

1. Unilineal systems : descent traced through parents & ancestors of only 1 sex (either mother’s
or father’s side).
2. Cognatic systems : descent traced through either or both parents.
➢ Only 30% of world's cultures trace descent and base group membership
on cognatic principle.
➢ Unilineal kinship institutions occur at over twice the incidence of
cognatic ones among the world's cultures. Unilineal descent
➢ Many societies construct kinship groupings, roles, and relationships by
tracing descent exclusively through the male - patrilineal - or female -
matrilineal - line.
➢ The resulting units are called unilineal descent groups, either
patrilineages or matrilineages according to the prevailing descent rule.
➢ Unilineal kinship institutions occur at over twice the incidence of
cognatic ones among the world's cultures.
➢ In many societies, unilineal descent groups assume important corporate
functions such as land ownership, political representation and mutual
aid and support.
➢ The powerful West African Ashanti kingdom developed within a
matrilineal society. Accordingly, the heir to the throne is not the king's
(Asantehene's) own child but his sister's son.
➢ Early British emissaries to Ashanti learned about this family system the
hard way.
➢ A third unilineal form, dual descent, involves the presence of significant
patrilineal and matrilineal groupings in single society. Their occurance
is relatively rare.
6.6.1 Unilineal Descent
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➢ Most cultures limit range of people through whom descent is traced by

using principle of unilineal descent.
➢ Traces descent only through a single line of ancestors, male or female.
➢ Both males & females are members of a unilineal grouping, but descent
links only recognized through relatives of one sex.
➢ The two basic forms of unilineal descent are referred to as patrilineal
and matrilineal.

6.6.2 Patrilineal Descent

➢ With patrilineal descent, both males & females belong to their father's
kin group but not their mother's.
➢ Only males pass on their family identity to their children.
➢ A woman's children are members of her husband's patrilineal line.

6.6.3 Matrilineal Descent

➢ Form of unilineal descent that follows a female line.
➢ Individuals are relatives if they can trace descent through females to the
same female ancestor.
➢ While both male & female children are members of their mother's
matrilineal descent group, only daughters pass on family line to their
offspring.

6.7 Basic Kinship Classification Systems Across Cultures

Since kin terms are fundamentally arbitrary categories, different cultures can potentially group
their relatives into a widely varying, indefinite number of classifications. Curiously,
anthropologists have observed that almost every culture has constructed a system of terms that
conforms to one of six widely occurring basic patterns. These are customarily designated as
follows:

1. Sudanese
2. Hawaiian
3. Eskimo
4. Iroquois
5. Omaha
6. Crow

6.7.1 Sudanese Kin Terms

The Sudanese system is completely descriptive and assigns a different kin term to each distinct
relative, as indicated by separate letters and colours in the diagram above. Ego distinguishes
between his father (A), his father's brother (E), and his mother's brother (H). There are
potentially eight different cousin terms.
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Table 3 Kinship Terms in Sudanese

Sudanese terminologies are difficult to relate to specific social institutions, since they include
no categories per se. They are generally correlated with societies that have substantial class
divisions.

Examples of Sudanese systems include:

➢ Latin kin terms

➢ Turkish kin terms
➢ Old English kin terms

6.7.2 Hawaiian Kin Terms

The Hawaiian system is the least descriptive and merges many different relatives into a small
number of categories. Ego distinguishes between relatives only on the basis of sex and
generation. Thus, there is no uncle term; (mother's and father's brothers are included in the
same category as father). All cousins are classified in the same group as brothers and sisters.

Table 4 Kinship Terms in Hawaiian

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Lewis Henry Morgan, a 19th century pioneer in kinship studies, surmised that the Hawaiian
system resulted from a situation of unrestricted sexual access or "primitive promiscuity" in
which children called all members of their parental generation father and mother because
paternity was impossible to acertain. Anthropologists now know that there is no history of such
practices in any of the cultures using this terminology and that people in these societies make
behavioural, if not linguistic, distinctions between their actual parents and other individuals
they may call "father" or "mother". Morgan's theses was based on an ethnocentric assumption
that the term for relatives in ego's parents' generation had the same meanings that father and
mother have in English. Hawaiian kinship semantics are now thought to be related to the
presence and influence of ambilineal descent systems.

The Hawaiian system can be illustrated by

➢ actual Hawaiian terms

6.7.3 Eskimo Kin Terms

The Eskimo system is marked by a bilateral emphasis - no distinction is made between
patrilineal and matrilineal relatives - and by a recognition of differences in kinship distance -
close relatives are distinguished from more distant ones. Another feature of Eskimo
terminology is that nuclear family members are assigned unique labels that are not extended to
any other relatives, whereas more distant relatives are grouped together on the basis
of collateral degree . (This process is called collateral merging). Because of predominant
marking of immediate family members, Eskimo terms usually occur in societies which place a
strong emphasis on the nuclear family rather than on extended kin or larger kinship groups.

Examples of Eskimo terminology include:

➢ English kin terms

➢ Ju/'hoansi (!Kung San) kin terms

Table 5 Kinship Terms in Eskimo

6.7.4 Iroquois Kin Terms

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The Iroquois system is based a principle of bifurcate merging. Ego distinguishes between
relatives on his mother's side of the family and those on his father's side (bifurcation) and
merges father with father's brother (A) and mother with mother's sister (B).

Table 6 Kinship Terms in Iroquois

Accordingly, father's brother's children and mother sister's children (parallel cousins) are
merged with brother and sister (C and D). This terminology occurs in societies that are
organized on the basis of unilineal descent, where distinctions between father's kin and
mother's kin are critical.

The Iroquois system can be illustrated by

➢ Yanomamo kin terms

6.7.4 Omaha Kin Terms

The Omaha system is similar to the Iroquois and is in fact a bifurcate merging system. Ego
uses the same categorizations for father, father's brother and mother's brother that he would in
an Iroquois terminology. However, there is a significant difference in cousin terminology.
Parallel cousins are merged with siblings, however cross-cousin terms are quite peculiar and
cut across generational divisions. Ego uses the same terms for his mother's brother's son as he
does for his mother's brother (F) and the same term for mother's brother's daughter as for his
mother (B).
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Table 7 Kinship Terms in Omaha

This lumping of generations is referred to as skewing. This pattern has the effect of stressing
common membership of relatives in patrilineal lines; Ego's "mother" is defined as a female
member of his mother's partilineage, and Ego's "mother's brother" as a male member of his
mother's patrilineage. As such Omaha terminologies are associated with societies that have a
strong patrilineal emphasis in their social organization.

Examples of Omaha terminologies include:

➢ Dani kin terms

➢ Igbo kin terms

6.7.5 Crow Kin Terms

The Crow system is a mirror image of the Omaha. Ego generally employs a bifurcate merging
pattern but applies a skewing rule to lump relatives within his father's matrilineage.

Table 8 Kinship Terms in Crow

The Crow system is a mirror image of the Omaha. Ego generally employs a bifurcate merging
pattern but applies a skewing rule to lump relatives within his father's matrilineage. Thus
father's sister's son gets the same term as father (A) and father's sister's daughter, the same term
as father's sister (E). This system is generally found in societies with strong matrilineal kinship
emphases.

The Crow system can be illustrated by

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➢ Akan kin terms

6.8 Assessment Questions

1. Define what is meant by kinship?

2. List some kinship terms that you use in your language?

3. Explain the descent systems that help identify kinship terms in a culture?

4. Which system of kinship classification does your language use?

5. How are culture and kinship terms related?

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Unit 7

COLOUR TERMINOLOGY AND EMOTIONAL

LANGUAGE

Written By : Dr. Lubna Umar

Reviewed By: Ms. Fatima Nagrah
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7. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is uniquely designed to include two sections where section one talks
about colour terminology while section number two talks about emotional language. Section
one aims at defining in detail what is colour language while explaining what are colour patterns
that are found in a language and colour lexemes used by language users. It also helps readers
understand Berlin and Kay’s colour terminology that talks about nature of language, language
as a system of symbols, language as a system of meaning, culture as a system and culture and
society. It also talks how colour terms manifest across cultures. Section two talks begins by
defining what is language in association with the psychological construction of emotions. it
helps students understand the relationship of culture and emotional language along with the
understanding of perception of emotion in a foreign cultures. For this unit, the following are
the learning objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

SECTION I
1. Define in detail what is colour language.

2. Explain what are colour patterns and colour lexemes.

3. Understand Berlin and Kay’s colour terminology including:

• Nature of Language
• Language as a System of Symbols
• Language as a System of Meaning
• Culture as a System
• Culture and Society

4. Develop an idea about the significance of colour terms in culture.

SECTION II
5. Define what is Language and the psychological construction of emotion.

6. Understand the relationship of culture and emotional language.

7. Understand perception of emotion in a foreign culture.

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SECTION I
COLOUR TERMINOLOGY

Exploring the concept of ‘color’ has been the focus of different studies since a very long time,
still the origin of color symbolism is so ancient that it has become impossible to trace or to say
exactly where it came from. As a part of the field of optics, in-depth studies have been
conducted on color to understand what the idea entails. Its application in experimental and
clinical psychology is still very recent; medicine has also found a use for color however
different from its conventional usage. Furthermore, other than the field of optics; that revolves
around understanding the physical characteristics of color – other areas have also tried to find
the meaningfulness of color and not just in subjective terms. Objectively, color has no meaning
i.e. it is just an optical manifestation or a visual phenomenon. But this goes without saying that
colors are extraordinarily rich source of symbolism. They are full of connotative (pragmatic)
and affective (feelings) meanings which are understood and elaborated on the basis of academic
knowledge and the requirement of the culture that is attempting to explore the concept.

7.1 Meaning of Colour Terms

Colour terms are mostly interpreted in the form of recognized phrases such as ‘red with anger’,
‘green with envy’. Such phrases are evidences of their authority and appropriateness as
examples of figurative or symbolic meanings. There is a strong connection between the
figurative and symbolic meanings given to colors, and the use of color words in the language.
In fact, the use of color words adds to a great extent, to the effectiveness of the notions
expressed by language.
Color terminology is a source that can be used to gather knowledge about therelationship
between different languages in terms of the cultures of the speech communities thatuse those
languages. It is obvious that all languages make use of basic color terms. A basic color term is
a single word i.e. green or violet, not combination of words such as light green ordark blue. It
can’t be the subdivision of some color, like crimson or scarlet which are of red. It is also used
generally; not confined to any specific objects or classes of objects. For example, in English
‘blonde’ is applied exclusively in the colour of hair and wood. Further, the term must not be
highly restricted, in the sense that it is used by only a certain section of speakers.

7.2 Patterns

A detailed study carried on color terms (found in a wide variety of languages) provides
information about certain interesting patterns. In case, only two terms are available in a
language, they are for equivalents to black and white or dark and light. If there is a third, it is
red.The fourth and the fifth terms will be yellow and green, but the order can be reversed. Blue
and brown occur as the sixth and seventh terms. Terms such as pink, gray, orange and purple
 78

as in English are found, but not in any particular order. We also come across combinations like
greenish-yellow, variations like pink, modification like fire-engine-red and various
designations assigned by paint and cosmetic manufacturers.
The extent of color terminology in specific languages can be related with the cultural and
technical aspects of the societies whose members speak these languages. It appears to
bereasonable to assume that communities that experience little technological advancement
have the fewest colour terms in usage, e.g., the Jale (a community) of New Guinea has words
corresponding to dark and light only. Whereas, societies that are technically advanced have
terms corresponding to all the above mentioned colour terms. Societies at intermediate level in
technological development have intermediate number of colour terms; for example, the Tiv
community of Nigeria has three terms; the Garoof Assam and the Hanunoo people of the
Philippines have four; and the Burmese have seven.

7.3 Berlin and Kay’s basic colour terms

The main claims of Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color Terms were:
(1) there is a ‘universal’ set of basic colour terms (‘black’, ‘white’, ‘grey’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’,
‘green’, ‘blue’, ‘orange’, ‘purple’, ‘pink’, and ‘brown’) from which any language ‘chooses’ a
subset;
(2) the subsets chosen are ordered in an ‘evolutionary’ sequence reconstructed from the
examination of extant colour vocabularies.
So dear students, in this unit the focus is on (1), since it is not entirely clear that the claims
about colour term ‘evolution’ are indicative of language influencing thought. Since the
legitimacy and significance of Berlin and Kay’s work depends upon the concept of a basic
colour term, it is worth commenting on how the authors arrived at it. Berlin and Kay utilized
a mixture of linguistic and psychological criteria intended to identify culturally salient colour
terms. The four primary criteria for a colour word being basic were
(i) It is monolexic: that is, the meaning is not predictable from the meaning of its parts.
(ii) Its signification is not included in that of any other colour term.
(iii) Its application must not be restricted to a narrow class of objects.
(iv) It must be psychologically salient for all informants.
Indices of psychological salience include, among others,
(1) a tendency to occur at the beginning of elicited lists of color terms,
(2) stability of reference across informants,
(3) occurrence in the idiolects of all informants.
(Berlin and Kay 1969)
The above criteria are just the primary one; they are further divided into sub-criteria for cases
where applying the primary criteria becomes difficult. To deal with such cases and keeping in
 79

mind the difficulties that could arise due to various reasons, the scholars did not suffice on the
primary criteria and have added the supplementary one. However, these criteria have been
controversial even though the idea of color language being basic when used with reference to
color and not its association with specific objects or cultural salience has proved attractive for
a number of researchers interested in exploring color language.

7.4 Colour Lexemes

Colour lexemes (the fundamental meaningful unit of the word stock of a language) are found
to vary from language to language. English has eleven basic colour lexemes: white, black, red,
green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray. Incontrast, the following features
are observed in other languages. Navaho has a single lexeme forboth brown and gray, but it
has two terms for black: the black of darkness and the black of suchobjects as goal. Two kinds
of blue are found in Russian and Hungarian has two terms for red. There is a single term for
green, blue or pale, depending on context (e.g. vegetables, sea, clouds) in Japanese. Only four
basic colour terms, black, white, red and green are available in Hanunoo color language and
colour cognition (knowledge).
We have already studied in the previous units that there are two versions of the Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis. The first is a strong version and claims that language determines or constrains
mental operations. The second, weak version claims that language influences mental
operations. It is also widely agreed that the strong version is problematic (see unit 1). Scholars
following the weak version wanted to see if one could show effects of languageon cognition,
aimed to do so by examining the relationship between color language and color cognition
(knowledge).
Suppose it is true that language and mind are related in such a way that language determines
mental operations or thoughts. If this were so, language and mind could not be separated or
studied in isolation. If language and mind cannot be separated, it will not be possible to
manipulate one or the other in order to show an effect of one upon the other, to specify, as
scholars would say, dependent and independent variables. From this examination of the
relationship between mind and color language developed the idea of codability. The idea was
that color terms that were more codable would be more memorable. Codabilityas intended as
a measure of cultural significance (thus connecting language and culture) and, assuming that
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were correct, manipulations of codability should show an effect in
memoryrecognition. If a color term was more codable (fed to the mind; could be coded and
stored), it was more likely to be successfully recalled on a memory task. If less codable,then
less likely to be successfully recalled. It is true that this result is far from Whorf’soccasionally
expressed idea of speakers of different languages living in different worlds. Nonetheless,it
appears to show that the way one thinks about colours is affected by the way one can talkabout
them.

7.5 The Place of Colour Terms in Culture

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It is an interesting phenomenon that language and culture are associated in such a way that
even the color terms in a certain language expression reflect the culture of that language. Some
cultural aspects which are common for all nations irrespective of ethnic, linguistic or religious
divisions are also represented by expressions linked with color terms. For instance, white stands
for purity, peace, etc., in almost all cultures throughout the world. Colour is one of the most
significant physical features of concrete objects. It partially contributes to the distinctiveness
and identity of a visible object and also adds to its external appearance. Human race has
manipulated the language to such a large extent that it not only helps in conceptualizing ideas
but also in highlighting the abstract qualities of different objects. The use of colour terms to
represent the abstract qualities in different languages remains the same in some instances and
varies in others. For example, in both English and Tamil, black represents melancholy, grief,
etc., and while ‘black lie’ and ‘white lie’ in English denote very harmful lie and harmless lie
respectively. The phrase ‘pachchai poi’, the literal meaning of which is green lie in Tamil refers
to the astringency of the lie.
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SECTION II
EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE

Humans are unique in experiencing complex emotions; they also have the unique challenge of
translating those experiences in a language that is understood by the others. So far many studies
have been conducted in order to find out how our emotional experiences get translated into
language and exchanged with others.
Before moving further, first let’s see what we mean by ‘emotion’, in strictly human terms
emotion is used in different ways and means different for different people. Scientifically, no
single definition has been agreed upon, thus we use this term to sometimes mean ‘discrete
emotions’ concerned with psychology. The term ‘discrete emotions’ refer to psychological
states that are experienced as coordinated patterns of physiology, behavior, and thoughts that
occur within certain types of situations, and which are described with certain emotion category
words (e.g., in English, “anger,” “disgust,” “fear,” “happiness,” “sadness,” etc.). We
differentiate “emotions” from “affect,” which consists of basic feelings from the core of the
body (for this reason, it is sometimes called “core affect”). Affect is the representation of the
body’s ever-changing internal state (from the smooth muscles, skeletal muscles, peripheral
nervous system, and neuro-chemical/hormonal system) and is often described as a homeostatic
barometer that allows an organism to understand whether objects in the world are good for it,
bad for it, approachable or avoidable.

7.6 Constructing Emotions

Language helps humans represent all category of knowledge, but may be especially important
to representing abstract categories that do not have strong perceptual (how things are to be
perceived) regularities in the world. In the case of abstract categories, words are a form of
“glue” that holds the concept together. The word “anger” is thus thought to be in part
constitutive of an angry feeling because it supports the category knowledge that is brought
online to make meaning of a rapidly beating heart, high blood pressure, and unpleasantness
when a person’s trust is violated, or to make meaning of a calmly beating heart, decreased
blood pressure and pleasantness when a person enacts revenge. This does not mean that a
person needs to speak the word “anger,” or even think it when making meaning of an affective
state. Instead, the idea is that “anger” groups a population of instances in a person’s conceptual
knowledge (involving representations of sensations from the body, behaviors, and the context)
that are all conceived of as members of the same category despite what otherwise might be
large differences between them. For instance, within the behavioral domain, punching, running
away, kicking, smiling, crying and scowling can all occur in an instance of “anger.” Without
that word to bind them, and based on their perceptual similarities alone (what it looks like or
feels like to punch, run, kick, smile, etc.), these instances might otherwise belong to different
categories and be experienced as such.
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7.7 Language Culture & Emotional Language

In answer to the question ‘In which language does the phrase “I love you’ feel stronger?”, Rie,
a native speaker of Japanese with English as a second language (L2), points out that the
Japanese avoid expressing their emotion overtly: ‘silence is beautiful in Japanese society. We
try to read an atmosphere’. Veronica Zhengdao Ye, a Chinese scholar who immigrated to
Australia, had made a similar point about the expression of emotion in China compared to how
it is done in the West:

‘We do not place so much emphasis on verbal expression of love andaffection, because
they can evaporate quickly’. She explains that she prefers the Chinese way of
expressing emotions: ‘subtle, implicit and without words’.

She describes her first parting from her parents, just before boarding the plane that would take
her to Australia: ‘we fought back our tears and urged each other repeatedly to take care; we
wore the biggest smiles to wave good-bye to each other, to soothe each others’ worries. Just
like any other Chinese parting between those who love each other – there were no hugs and no
“I love you”.Yet I have never doubted my parents’ profound love for me’. Ye explains that at
the beginning of her stay in Australia, when she was clearly expected to verbalize her feelings,
it madeher feel ‘stripped and vulnerable’. She was struck by the ease with which Australians
use ‘honeyed words’. She gradually understood that these expressions are pleasantries for
social purposes. She needed some time before she was able to recognize the emotions displayed
in the Australian context accurately and deal with them appropriately. Interestingly, two years
later, at the end of a visit home, Ye decides to give her parents ‘a long and tight embrace’ at
the same airport gate.

These two observations highlight the fact that the way humans express their emotions varies
from culture to culture. To elaborate, it means that there are cultural differences in the
prevalent, modal, and normative emotional responses. Ye’s story also illustrates the belief that
‘emotions are first and foremost a type of connection with our social worlds’.

In this view ‘emotions themselves are social phenomena that in the moment constitute a
relationship and are constituted by it’. Ye also offers a glimpse of the fascinating cultural
differences in the communication and perception of emotion in East and West. Moreover, her
exposure to Australian culture seems to affect the way she interacts with her parents on a return
visit to China. It seems a good illustration of emotional acculturation of immigrants, namely
the fact that individuals’ emotional patterns shift in response to changes in their sociocultural
context. In other words, emotions are ‘ongoing, dynamic, and interactive processes thatare
socially constructed’. Multilingual and multicultural individuals are an ideal group to
investigate the relationship between culture and emotional languageas they have developed a
unique capacity to navigate between the different norms of their different languages.

7.8 Automatic Processing of Emotion Words in Bilinguals

A surprising finding of automatic processing of emotion words by bilinguals emerged from a

study by Wu and Thierry (2012). Participants were native speakers of Chinese with advanced
knowledge of English. They were asked to indicate whether or not pairs of English words were
related in meaning while monitoring their brain electrical activity (ERP) and skin conductance.
Unbeknownst to the participants, some of the word pairs hid a sound repetition if translated
 83

into Chinese. The authors observed the expected sound repetition priming effect for positive
and neutral words, but English words with a negative valence such as ‘failure’ did not
automatically activate their Chinese translation. It thus seems ‘that emotion conveyed by words
determines language activation in bilinguals, where potentially disturbing stimuli trigger
inhibitory mechanisms that block access to the native language’. The authors point out that the
explanation advanced in the work of Caldwell Harris and Dewaele about differences in
emotional resonance of L1 and L2 cannot account for their findings. It is unlikely that late L2
learners would acquire negative and positive words in systematically different contexts, in
different periods of life, or master them atrelatively different levels. The authors conclude that
‘emotional processing unconsciously interacts with cognitive mechanisms underlying language
comprehension’.

7.9 Perception of Emotion in a Foreign Culture

The story of Veronica Zhengdao Ye in the preceding section was a good illustration of the
difficulty facing an individual suddenly transplanted in an environment with a different set of
emotional norms. Recognizing the emotion of interlocutors and judging its intensity is the first
difficult step before the immigrant can hope to react to these emotions appropriately in
interactions.

A pioneering study in this area is Rintell (1984) who asked foreign students of Spanish, Arabic
and Chinese origin, enrolled in an American Intensive English Program, to identify which
emotion – pleasure, anger, depression, anxiety, guilt, or disgust – best characterized each tape-
recorded conversations played to them. Participants were also asked to rate the intensity of
each emotion. Their responses were compared to those of a control group of native English
speakers, among whom there was a high level of agreement. Cultural background and language
proficiency played a significant role in the students’ performance. Language proficiency had
the strongest effect, with intermediate and advanced students scoring significantly higher
thanbeginners. However, even the most advanced students in the sample, who identified the
emotions conveyed in the conversations only about two thirds of the time, had significantly
lower scores than the control group. In addition, when learners of the three groups at
comparable levels of proficiency were compared to each other, it was found that Chinese
students had most difficultywith the task, followed by the Arab students and finally the Spanish
students.

Graham, Hamblin, and Feldstein (2001) found similar patterns for the identification of
emotionin English voices by native speakers of Japanese and native speakers of Spanish in an
EFL programme. The control group of native English speakers obtained the highest rate of
correct identification across all conditions, followed by the Spanish and the Japanese students.
An analysis of the mis-judgements revealed a mostly systematic pattern across related pairs of
emotions (angerconfused with hate and vice versa) for the English and Spanish students. The
Japanese studentsmanifested more non-systematic confusions than the Spanish students.

7.10 Emotion concepts in bilinguals

Pavlenko (2008) demonstrated that ‘emotion concepts vary across languages and that
bilinguals’ concepts may, in some cases, be distinct from those of monolingual speakers’. She
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defines emotion concepts as ‘prototypical scripts that are formed as a result of repeated
experiencesand involve causal antecedents, appraisals, physiological reactions, consequences,
and means ofregulation and display’. She distinguishes three possible relationships between
emotion concepts encoded in two different languages: complete overlap, partial overlap or no
overlap atall. This sets the stage for seven conceptual processes in the bilingual lexicon:

(1) co-existence
(2) L1 transfer
(3) internalization of new concepts
(4) restructuring
(5) convergence
(6) shift
(7) attrition

7.10.1 Co-existence

Co-existence is illustrated in the work of Stepanova Sachs and Coley (2006) on Russian–
English bilinguals and two monolingual control groups. The authors focused on differences in
the mapping of envy and jealousy in both languages. In Russian ‘revnuet’ is used to refer to
the emotion of jealousy while ‘zaviduet’ is used to refer to the emotion of envy. In English, on
the other hand, the word jealous is applied to both jealousy and envy. Participants had to select
a word to describe a jealousy or an envy story they had heard. Russian monolinguals chose the
most appropriate term while the English monolinguals considered the words envious and
jealous as being equally appropriate for describing the emotions of characters in envy stories.
For bilinguals, testing language determined responses. They behaved like Russian
monolinguals in Russian, and when they were tested in English, they responded like English
monolinguals. In a second experiment, involving a free sorting task, English monolinguals and
bilinguals were more likely to group envy and jealousy situations together than were Russian
monolinguals. It thus seems that bilinguals’ familiarity with the emotion terms in both
languages alters their conceptual representation of these emotions.

7.10.2 L1 Transfer and internalization of new concepts

Pavlenko and Driagina (2007) offered evidence for L1 transfer in the domain of emotion
concepts with advanced American learners of Russian. The learners used the copula verbs and
emotion adjectives in contexts where Russian monolinguals use emotion verbs. This is
evidence
that in discussing emotions in Russian the learners draw on the dominant L1 concept of
emotions as states and have not yet internalized the representation of emotions as processes.
Pavlenko and Driagina found that internalization does not always accompany L2 learning.
Although the American learners of Russian were aware of the meaning of the Russian emotion
verb ‘perezhivat’ (to experience things keenly) they did not use this verb in narrative tasks
where Russian monolinguals did.

7.10.3 Restructuring

Panayiotou (2006) found evidence of conceptual restructuring among her Greek–English

bilinguals for the concepts of guilt (‘enohi’) and shame (‘ntropi’) in Greek Cypriot culture.
Althoughthe terms have linguistic equivalents in Greek and English, ‘the meanings of these
translations differin the cultures examined’. Interestingly, some participants realized that their
 85

use of the English ‘guilt’ had affected the narrower conceptual category of ‘enohi’ and had led
them to produce inappropriate statements in Greek such as ‘I feel guilty for eating too much
cake’, which caused surprised stares from their interlocutors. The participants acknowledged
that they borrowed emotion terms from two emotional universes but insisted that these
universes‘are interconnected and guided by one unified ‘experiencer’ of the terms’.

7.10.4 Convergence and Shift

Pavlenko (2008) reports to have found no examples of conceptual convergence in emotion

concepts of bicultural bilinguals. However, she did find ample evidence of conceptual shift,
which ‘takes place in the lexicons of L2 users residing in the L2 context, whose representations
of partially overlapping concepts have shifted in the direction of L2-based concepts’. She
observed this shift in her own work on Russian–English bilinguals ‘who in their Russian
narratives appealed to combinations of change-of-state verbs and adjectives to describe
emotions as states, rather than as processes, thus displaying L2 influence on their
L1performance’.

De Leersnyder, Mesquita, and Kim (2011) looked at conceptual shift among immigrants,
labelling it ‘emotional acculturation’. The authors point out that the emotional experiences of
people who live together (dyads, groups, cultures) tend to be similar and that immigrants’
emotions probably demonstrate host culture patterns of emotional experience. They carried out
a study on Korean immigrants in the United States and on Turkish immigrants in Belgium
using an Emotional Patterns Questionnaire that allowed them to collect data on emotional
experiences of immigrants and host group members. The degree of immigrants’ emotional
similarity to the host group was reflected in a correlation value of their individual emotional
patterns with that of the average pattern of the host group. Immigrants’ exposure to and
engagement in the host culture predicted emotional acculturation. In other words, immigrants
who had spent a larger proportion of their life in the host country were more likely to have
emotionally acculturated as a result of intercultural interactions and relationships. The authors
raise the question about the changes that underlie the shifts in emotional patterns: Emotional
patterns may change either because immigrants who are introduced in the new culture will
experience different situations or because immigrants start appraising the same situations
differently.

7.10.5 Attrition

The final process described by Pavlenko (2008) is conceptual attrition, where, due to prolonged
contact with the L2, bilinguals cease to rely on a L1 conceptual category to interpret their
experiences. Evidence of such attrition was found where monolinguals and bilinguals retold
the same short film, portraying an emotional situation. While the Russian monolinguals
mentioned two central emotion concepts, ‘rasstraivat’sia’ (to be getting upset) and ‘perezhivat’,
the Russian–English bilinguals, however, only used the first notion ‘that has alexical and
conceptual counterpart in English but did not invoke the language- and culture-specificnotion
of ‘perezhivat’.
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7.11 Assessment Questions

1. How is color a pragmatic concept?

2. How are colors used to represent culture and emotion?

3. How is colour words different from others in a language?

4. Explain what are colour patterns and colour lexemes?

5. Define in detail the colour terminology given forth by Berlin and Kay?

6. Define what is meant by emotional language?

7. List some emotional terms that you use in your language?

8. Do the words denoting emotions mean the same across cultures?

9. What are the most dominant emotional words in your vocabulary? What do they tell
you about your personality?
 87

Unit 8

EMBODIMENT, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By : Ms Fatima Nagrah
 88

8. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide an overview of ‘Embodiment, Culture and
Language’ that links the language and culture debate with our bodily experiences. While doing
so, the focus is mainly on defining what is meant by the notion of embodiment, how the body
is a culturally constructed phenomenon and how its understanding helps us understand various
concepts in language that are interpreted through the embodied experience. Moreover, it will
also discuss how different cultures attach different meaning to certain words and how they
differ across cultures.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define the notion of embodiment.

2. Understand body as a culturally constructed concept

3. Have an idea about the relationship of language with culture and embodiment.
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8.1 The Notion of Embodiment

The notion of embodiment in the language and mind paradigm focuses on the role of the body
in forming cognition within the cultural context. The embodiment hypothesis claims that the
body actually shapes the mind. Such a mind is therefore embodied in; that it is crucially shaped
by the particular nature of the human body, including our perceptual and motor systems and
our interactions with the physical and cultural world. However, the mind is not shaped
universally because the body itself may take different ‘shapes’ in different cultural models in
the first place. Cultures construe the body and bodily experiences differently, attributing
different values and significances to various body parts and organs and their functions. Various
cultural perceptions of the body and bodily experiences motivate different concepts, which give
rise to varied perspectives in the understanding of the world.

Therefore, to contribute to a better understanding and articulation of the relationship among

body, culture, and cognition, this unit looks in particular at how body and culture interact in
the motivation, formation, and operation of human meaning, reasoning, and understanding in
abstract domains as embedded in the use of language.

The term embodiment, as suggested by the root of the word itself, is related to the body, but it
is really about how the body is related to the mind in the environment, and how this relationship
affects human cognition (mental processes). The basic idea behind embodiment is that the mind
emerges and takes shape from the body with which we interact with our environment. Human
beings have bodies, and human embodiment shapes both what we know and how we know it,
understand, think, and reason. We can know, understand, think, and reason only from and
within our bodily experience: ‘No body, never mind’. That is, embodiment represents a
theoretical approach to the study of mind in cognitive science commonly known as embodied
cognition. This approach focuses on the co-evolution between minds and bodies, and on the
whole behaving organism in its natural context in which individual humans interact in and
across groups. When cognition is said to be embodied, it offers a radical shift in explanations
of the human mind, emphasizing the way cognition is shaped by the body and its sensory motor
interaction with the world.

Activity: Find out the detailed meaning of Cognition from the dictionary and write down a
few cognitive processes that you are employ as a student?

Activity: Discuss the phrase No body, never mind’ in light of what you have read and think
of an example where it can be applied.

The world that we live in, is both physical and sociocultural. In the past decades, embodiment
has stimulated increasingly growing research in cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field
where a number of disciplines such as anthropology, artificial intelligence, computer science,
linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology converge and overlap for the study of the
mind. Scholars have put forward a variety of programmatic theses for the embodiment
paradigm, including ‘the body in the mind’ (Johnson), ‘the culture in the mind’ (Shore), and
‘the culture in the body’ (Maalej), which are important theses in the studies of the relationship
between body, mind, and culture.

In his book, Embodiment and Cognitive Science, Gibbs states that, embodiment refers to
‘understanding the role of an agent’s own body in its everyday, situated cognition’, namely
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how our bodies influence the ways we think and speak. He outlines the following as the
embodiment premise:

People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the
fundamental grounding for language and thought [i.e. how people experience things
shapes and forms the basis of language and thought]. Cognition is what occurs when
the body engages the physical, cultural world and must be studied in terms of the
dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and
thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing
intelligent behaviour. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic,
computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language
and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action.

Gibbs suggests that the key feature here for understanding the embodied nature of human
cognition is to ‘look for possible mind–body and language-body connections’ as formed in
the interaction between the body and the physical and cultural world.

8.2 A Historical Overview: Cartesian Dualism

In a general sense, the term embodiment breaks the previously formed and accepted concept
of duality of mind and body by infusing body with mind, attributing a more active and
constructive role to the body in human cognition. This view is in contrast and reaction to
‘disembodied’ Cartesian dualism, represented by the French philosopher and scientist René
Descartes (1596–1650), which has been the dominant view on the mind–body relations in
Western philosophy during the past few hundred years.

According to the Cartesian mind–body split, the body, which has material properties and
follows the law of physics; works like a machine. In contrast, the mind (or soul), which is a
non-material entity – that does not follow the law of physics but has the capacity to think,
controls the body. Descartes gives forth an absolute difference between the mind and the body,
the former defining selfhood and personhood and having supremacy over the latter; in his
words, ‘I think, therefore I am’ and ‘the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct
from the body’.

Therefore, Cartesianism tends to disregards the body in favour of the mind, to privilege the
mind over the body, or even to describe the body as an enemy to the mind. The Cartesian mind
is disembodied. A problem for Descartes, as for all Cartesianists, is how to account for the
intermingling of mind and body, given their absolute difference and separation. In the modern
West, however, the self and the person have been largely conceptualized in terms of
oppositions between reason, thought and intellect, on the one hand, and emotion, feeling and
desire, on the other, all along the Cartesian dualistic line between mind and body.

The mind–body dualism is also understood as a double concept between head (LOCATION
FOR ACTIVITY) and heart (PART FOR WHOLE). The ‘separation between body and mind’
is referred to as ‘Descartes’error’, which treats thinking as an activity quite separate from the
body, and celebrates theseparation of mind, the ‘thinking thing’, from the ‘nonthinking body’.

8.3 Challenges of Cartenianism

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While Cartesianism has dominated Western thought in the past few hundred years, it has
faced some challenges.

8.3.1 Giambattista Vico

For instance, philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) responded to Descartes
with his own humanism. He argued for the evolution of human language and cognition as the
extension of bodily experiences through human imagination structured by metaphor and
metonymy. The magnificent insight is that human language and cognition have evolved with
the human mind thinking and knowing on the basis and with the help of the human body.

8.3.2 Charles Darwin

Moreover, Charles Darwin (1809–82) tried to explain how different species had evolved by
assuming a mental linkage between animals and humans. In modern terms, Darwin viewed the
mind as embodied and did not believe it to be separate from the body.

8.3.3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In the twentieth century, the Cartesian dualism was seriously challenged by French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is an attempt to think beyond
the dualism of mind and body. Rather than two separate entities, mind and body are
fundamentally interwoven components of an indivisible humanwhole, a body-subject that is
simultaneously physical and mental. He argued that the body is one’s general medium for
having a world, and that it is through one’s body that one understandsother people. In Merleau-
Ponty’s work, the body is described as an organism capable of perceiving and activating itself
in organized ways, i.e., the body as a structure of perceptual and behavioural competence.
According to him, humans are inserted into the world bodily and human experience of the
world comes to human beings through their bodies. That is, the human being is first and
foremost a bodily being and human cognition is achieved through its bodily experience. Human
thinking is ‘a movement of the body’, and humans ‘are moved into thinking’. That is, it is not
the brain alone that does the thinking, but the whole body. The body has the necessary
knowledge to perform tasks at hand since it knows how to act and how to perceive through the
history of its perceptual and sensorimotor interactions with the environment. For him,
therefore, the body actually provides meaning or intentionality for the mind, whereas the mind
is essentiallyembodied and interacting with the surrounding world.

Activity: Can you think of an activity that requires the use of the mind that you perform
without consciously using the mind?
Hint: have you ever driven a car while your thoughts have been focused elsewhere?

8.3.4 Jean Piaget

The Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) also stressed the importance of
sensorimotor activity for the emergence of intelligent behaviour. For him, cognition is about
the organization of an agent’s sensorimotor experiences and interactions with the environment,
but his theory, which he claimed as universal, has been criticized as not paying much attention
to cultural differences in cognitive development.

8.3.5 Lev Vygotsky

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The role of culture, however, was strongly emphasized by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky
(1896–1934), who proposed that individual cognitive development requires a sociocultural
embedding through certain transformation processes. Thus, the cognitive abilities of an
‘enculturated’ person are the product ofdevelopmental processes, in which primitive and
immature humans are transformed into cultural onesthrough social interactions. Vygotsky’s
theory is commonly contrasted with Piaget’s as having adifferent focus, although in fact the
theories are largely compatible and agree in viewing knowledge as constructed through the
interaction of biological and sociocultural factors in the 0course of cognitive development.

8.3.6 William James and John Dewey

In the American context, it is argued, the concept of embodiment in cognition has its
philosophical and psychological roots in the works of thinkers such as William James and John
Dewey. According to them, cognition emerges from the embodied nature and processes of an
organism that is constantly adapting to better utilize relatively stable patterns within a changing
environment. This naturalistic approach seeks to explain how meaning, abstract thinking, and
formal reasoning could emerge from the basic sensorimotor capacities of organisms as they
interact with the environment and one another, with the fundamental assumption that
everything we attribute to mind – perceiving, conceptualizing, imagining, reasoning, etc. – has
emerged as part of a process in which an organism seeks to survive and grow within different
kinds of situations. This evolutionary embeddedness of the organism within its changing
environments, and the development of thought in response to such changes, ties mind
inextricably to body and environment. On this view, mind is never separate from body, for it
is always a series of bodily activities immersed in the ongoing flow of organism–environment
interactions that constitutes experience. This concept of relating bodily experiences with
thinking and their connection with environment depicts that there is no break or gap in
experience between perceiving, feeling, and thinking.

8.3.7 Computationalist Cognitive Science

By the mid-twentieth century, the ‘cognitive revolution’ was underway. Along with
advancements in the field of computer science, this ‘cognitive revolution’ led to the rise of
‘computationalist cognitive science’, defined and characterized by the computer metaphor for
mind. According to this metaphor, cognition takes place in the head in the form of abstract
symbol manipulation, whereas the body only serves as an input and output device, i.e., a
physical interface between internal program (cognitive processes) and external world,
executing commands generated in the mind through symbol manipulation.

In this view, the nature of cognition is such that the minds or brains, which function like
computers, accept information, manipulate symbols, store items in memory and retrieve them
again, classify inputs, recognize patterns, and so on. The relation between body and mind was
considered to be similar to the one between hardware and software in a computer, with the
body being viewed as a mere physical implementation of the mind - which however is largely
implementation independent.

Computationalism in cognitive science became very successful mainly because it seemed to

offer an elegant solution to the mind–body problem, bridging the gap between body and
biology (hardware) on the one hand and mind and psychology (software) on the other, with the
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exciting metaphor of mental states and processes acting as the software running on the brain’s
hardware. It is therefore of no surprise that the computer metaphor became the dominant model
of how the mind works.

Activity: How do you understand the metaphor, ‘MIND IS COMPUTER’? What are the
characteristics of both? Do they really match when you compare them? Can you think of any
other characteristic that matches than the one given above? Can you think of a better
metaphor for the mind?

8.3.8 Current Trends

Today, the centrality of the body and embodiment in human cognition is broadly acknowledged
and this has provoked a huge quantity of research throughout a wide range of scientific domains
associated with cognitive science. Cognition is seen as depending on the body and its
sensorimotor systems in a fundamental way, emerging from our bodily based experience and
our sensorimotor interactions with the world that is both physical and sociocultural. This is
certainly a more than welcome shift in the traditional Western research paradigm, since this
reorientation can help to free it from the old, seemingly unresolvable dualisms between body
and mind, between the internal world of immaterial concepts and thoughts and the external
world of objectivist reality.

8.4 Body as a culturally constructed concept

In the past decades, the meaning of the term embodiment, however, ‘has been stretched in
different directions’ as it has become more popular. The present widespread use of the notions
of body and embodiment across different fields and with different meanings makes it
particularly important to develop a better understanding and clarification of these two notions.’

While embodiment has to do with the physical and biological body, what is embodied,
however, is always some set of meanings, values, tendencies, orientations that have derived
from the sociocultural realm. Embodiment refers to patterns of human behaviour enacted on
the body and expressed in the bodily form. In other words, although it is always the same
biological and physical body that is said to embody various aspects of human experience, what
is embodied is clearly not just the biological and physical but the social and cultural as well.

Socio-culturally situated embodiment characterizes the relationship between body and culture
and the diversity of cultural meanings attached to the body. The body system offers insightful
analysis for understanding cultural systems because physical environments in which people
and their bodies move are linked with culture. Anthropologists have demonstrated how many
elementary embodied experiences are shaped by local cultural knowledge and practice in a
variety of cultural settings. The body is appreciated for its symbolic properties as people instill
cultural meanings into bodily processes and activities. Culture does not just inform, but also
constitute, embodied experience. Many embodied experiences are rooted in sociocultural
contexts.

This does not mean that people in various cultures have different physiologies, but only that
they understand their embodied experiences differently in how they interpret their sensorimotor
interactions in and with the world around them. It is therefore important to explore the linkages
between embodiment and cultural meaning.
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In reality, however, ‘body’ is often taken as a natural, self-evident concept, one that does not
need any further elaboration, but it sometimes appears to be, paradoxically, the most
misleading. Metaphorically speaking, the human body is a kaleidoscope capable of producing
amazingly diversified and ever-changing colourful patterns of view. As pointed out nicely by
Armstrong,

‘The body is what it is perceived to be; it could be otherwise if perception were

different. The question is not therefore concerned with the nature of the body but with
the perceiving process which allows the body’s nature to be apprehended’.

Synnott summarizes the wide range of meanings, metaphorical and otherwise, which
the body carries, as follows:

In sum, the body has been and still is constructed in and understood in as many ways
as there are individuals – it appears to be all things for all people. Thus the body is
defined as good or bad; tomb or temple; machine or garden; cloak or prison; sacred or
secular; friend or enemy; cosmic or mystical; one with mind and soul or separate;
private or public; personal or the property of the state; clock or car; to varying degrees
plastic, bionic, communal; selected from a catalogue or engineered; material or
spiritual; a corpse of the self.

French author and symbolist poet Paul Valéry opines that the body is commonly used to refer
to a wide variety of things. It is the privileged object we possess, although our knowledge of it
may be extremely variable and subject to illusions. We speak of it as a thing that belongs to us;
but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it.
According to Kuriyama, ‘The body is unfathomable and breeds astonishingly diverse
perspectives precisely because it is a basic and intimate reality. In simple words, body is not a
simple concept or understood to be one. It is as diverse as the people in different parts of the
world and its understanding as variant as the understanding of the people. The task of
discovering the truth of the body is inseparable from the challenge of discovering the truth
about people.’ The body is ‘never just a purely biological entity but one which has social and
cultural dimensions too’, being influenced by social and cultural forces which shape or attempt
to shape it in their own image – the ‘body’ can never be studied in isolation i.e. without
considering the social and cultural dimensions.

Body is an abstract construct. The concept of body has resulted from the various discourses
that ‘construct’ it. Even if the physical experience of the body can appear an immediate one,
the concept of body certainly does not. Instead, it is taken as ‘construals’ (In social psychology,
construals are how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them,
particularly the behavior or action of others towards themselves) of it within any disciplinary
perspective. ‘In other words, the various meanings attributed to the notion of body are the sum
of the various effects on its sense of the different disciplines as they investigate and define it.’
All different ‘bodies’ are not reducible to one another. Many of the differences in the use of
the very word ‘embodiment’ depend on thedifferent discourses that construct body in their
respective ways as an object of research.

Therefore, there is really no such thing as a body ‘in itself’. Body cannot be described outside
the different practices and discourses that define it, independent of the cultures that shape it.
No ‘hard’ science can escape from this paradox: even the body described by the most
sophisticated technologies – radiography, magnetic resonance imaging, spectroscopy, etc. – is
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but just another way of representing it. Even the body as studied in medicine is a construal, so
much so that different medical practices in different cultures construe as many different bodies
as there are cultures: the Western body studied in Western medical tradition is not the same as
the body mapped by Chinese acupuncture.

The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the
same, a universal reality. But then we look into history, and our sense of reality wavers …
accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions frequently appear to describe mutually alien,
almost unrelated worlds.’ After all, from an anthropological point of view, ‘medicine is a
culture with its own language, gestures, customs, rituals, spaces, costumes, and practices.
Within medical culture, the body becomes the locus that corporealizes culture, enculturates
bodiliness’

In short, the body does not terminate with the fleshy boundary of the skin, but rather extends
out into its environment that is at once physical, social, and cultural, engaging in all sorts of
bodily and sociocultural interactions, so that the organism and environment are not
independent, but rather interdependent aspects of the basic flow of bodily experience. That is,
to fully understand the role of the body in human cognition, we will have to go beyond the
body itself

8.5 Embodiment and culture in language

As one approach to the study of language, associated with second-generation, embodied

cognitive science, Cognitive Linguistics, especially its conceptual metaphor theory, has for
decades seriously challenged the fundamental assumption that most of our thinking about the
world is literal, directly corresponding to the external reality, asserting that meaning
construction in and through language is not a separate and independent module of the mind,
but reflects our overall experience as embodied beings. There are at least two main aspects to
the broad experiential (based on experience) grounding of linguistic meaning:

First, we are embodied beings, not pure minds. Our organic nature (as we are born) influences
our experience of the world, and this experience is reflected in the language we use … Second
… we are not just biological entities: we also have a cultural and social identity, and our
language may reveal that identity, i.e. languages may embody the historical and cultural
experience of groups of speakers (and individuals).

These studies of cognition have shown that human minds are embodied in the cultural world,
and human meaning, feeling, and thinking are largely rooted in bodily and sociocultural
experiences. It is argued that ‘all cognition is embodied in cultural situations’ While
manifesting embodied cognition, language is after all a cultural form andshould be studied in
its social and cultural context, as conceptualizations underlying language and language use are
largely formed and informed by cultural systems.

Human cognition embodied in its sociocultural context, as reflected in language, will be

illustrated by some linguistic examples from Chinese in comparison and contrast with English.

(1) a. zui-yingshou-ruan
mouth-tough hands-soft
‘talk tough but act soft’
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b. yan-gaoshou-di
eye-high hands-low
‘have great ambition but little ability; have sharp eyes in criticizing others but
clumsy hands in doing things oneself’

Both of these idiomatic expressions with body-part terms are formed via metaphor and
metonymy grounded in our immediate bodily experience, especially with respect to the
structure of our body and the functions the parts of our body perform. Thus, in (1a), zui ‘mouth’
stands for talking and shou ‘hands’ for acting, both metonymically. With the two body-part
nouns in combination with the two adjectives appealing to the sense of touch, the expression
as a whole refers metaphorically to some people’s inability or unwillingness to back up in deeds
(‘hands-soft’) their tough talk in words (‘mouth-tough’).

Example (1b) also contains shou ‘hands’ as well as yan ‘eyes’. This expression describes, again
metaphorically, the inconsistencies of people whose ability does not match their ambition, or
who are too critical of others’ ability while they themselves are not capable at all. Our eyes set
goals, and our hands act to achieve those goals. While we can ‘aim high’ with our eyes, our
aim may be too high for us to ‘reach’ with our hands. Both examples show how human bodily
experience works its way up to shape abstract concepts in human cognition and language.

A contrastive case that exemplifies differences in the shaping of the body by cultural models
lies in the fundamental difference between Western and Chinese (along with some other Asian)
cultures in the conceptualization of ‘person’. This difference can be expressed by two formulas:

(2) a. Western: PERSON = BODY + MIND

b. Chinese: PERSON = BODY + HEART

These formulas can then be further illustrated as shown in the table below. The Western
conceptualization of ‘person’ is dualistic in that a person is ‘split’ into two distinct and separate
parts: the body and the mind. This mind–body dichotomy defines Cartesian dualism, which has
been the dominant philosophicalview in the West for hundreds of years.

In contrast to the Western dualistic view, Chinese takes on a more holistic view that sees the
heart as the center of both emotions and thought. In the traditional Chinese conceptualization,
therefore, although a person also consists of two parts – the body and the heart (xin), these two
are however not separate, the latter being an integral part of the former. According to this
cultural conceptualization, the heart is regarded as the central faculty of cognition.

Western concept Chinese concept of

of PERSON PERSON
BODY + MIND BODY + HEART

Table 9: The difference between Western and Chinese cultures in the conceptualization of ‘person’

The contrast characterizes two cultural traditions that have developed different
conceptualizations of person, self, and agent of cognition. Reflecting Cartesian dualism in the
West, the present-day English word mind is basically free of emotions and morally neutral, but
instead has the predominantly intellectual and rational orientation, with a modern emphasis on
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thinking and knowing, not on feeling, wanting, or any other nonbodily processes. Thus,
present-day mind
displays the following characteristics in collocation:

(3) a. * a happy mind (emotional)

b. * a fiery mind (emotional)
c. * a noble mind (moral)
d. * an ignoble mind (moral)
e. an inquisitive mind (seeking knowledge)
f. an inquiring mind (seeking knowledge)
g. a brilliant mind (good at thinking)
h. a keen mind (active in thinking and seeking to know)
i. a good mind (intellectual)

As is shown, mind cannot be in collocation with adjectives of emotion and moral (3a–d).
Instead, it can only combine with adjectives related to thought, knowledge, and intellect (3e–
i).

In contrast, the Chinese concept of ‘heart’, because the heart is traditionally conceptualized as
the central faculty of cognition, is lexicalized in a great number of compounds and idioms
related to all cognitive and affective aspects of a human person, such as mental, intellectual,
rational, moral, emotional, dispositional, and so on. The Chinese expressions in the list below
(accompanied by literal translations in the parentheses next to them) are just some examples,
where their English equivalents are provided in a separate column for comparison and contrast:

(4) Chinese English

a. cheng-xin (sincere-heart) sincerity
b. liang-xin (good-heart) conscience
c. zhi-xin (knowing-heart) intimate; understanding (friend)
d. xin-xiang (heart-think) think to oneself
e. xin-fu (be heart-convinced) be genuinely convinced
f. xin-gan (be heart-willing) be willing
g. hao-xin (good-heart) good intention
h. cheng-xin (establish-heart) on purpose
i. yong-xin (use-heart) with concentrated attention
j. jue-xin (determined-heart) determination; be determined
k. wei-xin (disobey/violate-heart) against one’s will
l. heng-xin (constant-heart) perseverance; persistence
m. xiao-xin (small-heart) be careful; be cautious
n. cu-xin (thick-heart) careless; thoughtless
o. jiao-xin (scorch-heart) feel terribly worried
p. kai-xin (open-heart) feel happy
q. xin-zui (be heart-drunk) be charmed; be enchanted

This list can go on and on. The difference in lexicalization, as shown above suggests that there
are different interpretations of the workings of the body; heart organ in particular and how they
are related to the ‘mind’ in the conceptualization (understanding) of the person. The Chinese
compound words point to an embodied view of ‘mind’, but this embodiment is situated in the
context of Chinese culture that traditionally holds that the heart is the central faculty of
cognition
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8.6 Assessment Questions

1. Define what is meant by embodiment?

2. List some terms that draw their meaning from body related terms used in your
language?

3. Explain the idea of the human body as a culturally constructed concept?

4. How has the term ‘embodiment’ developed over time?

5. How is the term ‘body’ constructed?

6. It is stated that ‘the human language and cognition have evolved with the human mind
thinking and knowing on the basis and with the help of the human body.’ elaborate!
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Unit 9

LANGUAGE, CULTURE
AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Written By : Dr Lubna Umar

Reviewed By :Ms FatimaNagrah
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9. Introduction

Dear students, this unit is designed to provide an overview of ‘Language, Culture and Second
Language Acquisition’. While doing so, the focus is mainly on understanding the concept of
foreign language learning, the relation between language and culture from a foreign language
learning perspective. Moreover, it will also talk about the five C’s in foreign language learning
in order to enrich the understanding of the students. For this unit, the following are the learning
objectives.

Learning objectives of the unit:

At the end of this section, the students will be able to:

1. Define in detail Foreign Language Learning and Culture.

2. Understand the relation between language and culture from the foreign language
learning perspective.

3. Explain the concept of language, culture and communication Foreign Language

Learning and Culture

4. Have an idea about the five C’s in second/foreign language learning.

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9.1 Foreign Language Learning and Culture

The teaching of culture in foreign language (FL) learning is facing new challenges associated
with the globalization of linguistic and cultural exchanges across the world. The rapid growth
of global media and electronic social networks, the division within national boundaries of
majority and minority languages, foreign, second and heritage language learners, and, beyond
national boundaries, the deterritorialization of national languages and their cultural
characteristics due to increased migration and the formation of diaspora communities – all these
developments have transformed the nature and the role of culture in FL learning. The nature
that was understood to be the cultural and historical context in which languages were taught
and used has now become a part of the memories and projected stereotypes, constructed in and
through discourses whose authenticity is uncertain as they are considered local and global, real
and imagined. Let’s first look into the changes that have occurred in the last thirty years, and
later examine the challenges of the language–culture duo in FL learning today.

9.2 Language and culture: the uncontested duo

In the twentieth century, language in FL learning was understood to be a separate entity not
associated with culture. Based on the eighteenth-century view that ‘every nation speaks …
according to the way it thinks and thinks according to the way it speaks’, it was taken for
granted that speech communities, whether they be nationally, regionally, or ethnically defined,
were held together not only by a common language but also by common ways of thinking,
behaving and otherwise making sense of the world – in other words their ‘culture’. Moreover,
it was also believed that speech communities were only different because of their different
linguistic systems and because of the different speech habits of their native speakers/writers
and their way of life. The speech habits of native speakers informal, written, or academic
situations were captured by the big C culture of literature and the arts, the speech habits of
native speakers in informal conversations were captured by the little c culture of everyday life.
Until the 1960s, the focus in FL learning was placed on big C culture. The traditional
reason/purpose of learning foreign languages was to be able to one day read the foreign
literature in the original, become a cultured, educated person, and be able to hold sophisticated
conversations with educated native speakers. After the communicative revolution of the 1960s,
little c culture became the focus as did the need to be communicatively competent (intelligent
communication) when interacting with native and other non-native speakers in everyday life.
Little c culture took the form of pragma-linguistic (pragmatics and linguistics) and socio-
pragmatic competence with the ability to use language in culturally appropriate ways. In
communicative language teaching, the link between culture and discourse was made clear, so
that intercultural competence came to be equated with interdiscursive competence. Some
scholars have distinguished between foreign language study that includes both big c and little
c culture, and second language learning that deals with the little c culture of homes and
workplaces.
However, the distinction is not apparent in the context of general education and is more
depended on the idea of language learning being replaced with apprenticeship in an authentic
immersion context or community of practice i.e. where different people can come together to
learn.
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Note that, whether culture was seen as mostly literate (as in ‘literature and the arts’) or mostly
oral (as in ‘way of life’), it was always considered to be the shared characteristic of a
homogeneous speech community, whose members had a common way of remembering the
past, defining the present and imagining the future. That speech community occupied an
identifiable place on the map, which was outside the learner’s national borders in the case of
foreign languages, or inside these borders but in minority enclaves in the case of heritage
languages. Even for an international language like English, English was taught around the
world as the language of native speakers living in Kachru’s first circle countries (Kachru, 1990)
– the UK, the USA, or Australia, and their respective national cultures.
The cultural component of FL learning was, in the twentieth century, relatively easy to identify.
Applied linguistic research focused on operationalizing (making active or actively involving)
various kinds of cultural competence in a foreign language. Cross-cultural pragmatics explored
the dimensions of pragmatic appropriateness (suitable implications) across cultures or
culturally different ways of realizing speech acts while research on the interculturaland the
transcultural focused on the exchange oflinguistic, ideational, and economic resources in a
world of increased international relations.
The conception of culture discussed above is a modernist conception that is still with us today.
Even though ‘culture’ remains difficult to define and to operationalize in the classroom for
many language teachers, it is still talked about as ‘membership in a discourse community that
shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings. Even when they have left
that community, its members may retain, wherever they are,a common system of standards for
perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting. These standardsare what is generally called their
‘culture’. Language learners are well awarethat the linguistic structures they are learning have
a different meaning for native speakers thanthey have for them - who come from a different
discourse community with different culturalstandards and perceptions. The pleasure – and the
difficulties – of learning another language come not fromdifferences in structure but from
differences in the semiotic (symbolic) value attached to these structures.

9.3 The Five C’s of Foreign Language Learning

The National Standards promoted by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign
Languages (ACTFL) represented a modernist view when they proposed their five C goals of
foreign language learning in the US:
➢ Communication: communicate, i.e., provide and obtain information, express
feelingsand emotions, and exchange opinions, in languages other than English.

➢ Cultures: gain knowledge of and understand the relationship between the practicesand
perspectives of the cultures studied.

➢ Connections: connect with other disciplines and acquire information through

theforeign language.

➢ Comparisons: develop insight into the nature of language and culture

throughcomparison with your own.
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➢ Communities: participate in multilingual communities at home and around theworld,

both within and beyond the school setting.

These standards, that are still applied today in teacher training and textbook writing, make
threeassumptions about language and culture, learners of language and culture, and language
andculture education. The first assumption is that language is a direct medium to and
expression ofculture (The study of another language enables students to understand a different
culture on itsown terms). Culture is ‘generally understood to include the philosophical
perspectives, the behavioral practices, and the products – both tangibleand intangible (abstract
and concrete)–of a society. Perspectives (meanings, attitudes, values, ideas), practices (patterns
of social interactions), andproducts (books, tools, foods, laws, music, games) constitute ‘the
true content of the foreignlanguage course, i.e., the cultures expressed through that language.
According to this definition, mastery of a foreign grammar and lexicon will give the learner
access to, connectionwith and even participation in ‘the global community and marketplace.
The second assumption is that ‘all students can be successful language and culture learners’
and that ‘all can benefit from the development and maintenance of proficiency in more than
one language’. This assumption reaffirms the multicultural nature of American society and
includes heritage language learners i.e. learning the language from a certain ethno-linguistic
group in the efforts to contribute to the global linguistic and cultural diversity.The third
assumption is that language and culture education contributes to the enhancement ofthe two
main tenets of American public school education: ‘basic communication skills and higherorder
thinking skills. In sum: a twentieth-century view of FL learning has been called ‘modernist’ in
that it assumes a positivistic, objective link between one language and one culture. It is
predicated on the following tenets:
– Language is a tool to express pre-existing thoughts, a neutral conduit (medium) for the
transmission of ideas and intentions.
– The meaning of words is enclosed in grammars and dictionaries and can find its rough
equivalents in the dictionaries of another language.
– Communication is mostly about the accurate, concise, and effective exchange of information.
– Cultures are clearly bounded by territorial, ethnic or ideological boundaries.
– Cultures can be compared by comparing, for example, verbal and non-verbal behaviours in
one’s own and in the target culture.
– Communities have their rules of behaviours that need to be observed if communication is to
proceed smoothly.

9.4 The New Global Age

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Since the late 1980s, economic globalization took off, the deregulation (removal of restrictions)
of business and commerce has accelerated the mobility (increased the exchange and reach) of
people and capital around the globe. It has been facilitated in part by the new global information
technologies, global media, and a neo-liberal ideology of a free market entrepreneurial culture
that has taken over all sectors of public life, including education, in this era of late capitalism.
Globalization has weakened the traditional role of the nation state’s schools as monolingual
gatekeepers of the citizens’ grammatical accuracy and pragmatic appropriateness and as the
exclusive warrant of legitimate literacy practices. Corporate interests have far outpaced
national interests in promoting a different kind of literacy and communicative competence –
one based less on cultural pride and more on commercial profit. That is to say that globalization
has monopolized what ideas are to be shared and the grammatical accuracy in them. Moreover,
nation state schools decide the implications or the hidden meaning and associations in language
as their language is considered a standard that must be followed. This has resulted in the
promotion of commercial profit rather than cultural pride and national interests.
In a perspective based on cultural pride, learning another language is getting access to a wealth
of historical knowledge, a culture shaped by centuries of language use by members of the same
national, regional or ethnic community, who take pride in their membership in that community.
Words have a cultural meaning that is shared by the members of the community, they refer to
and evoke a way of categorizing reality, of conceptualizing experience, of mediating thoughts,
emotions, memories, and fantasies that is common to all speakers within the well-bounded
‘imagined communities’ evoked by maps and other territorial materialities. To say that, when
language is not seen as a commercial commodity, the real wealth is considered to be the
knowledge of history and culture of the language. Culture - that is shaped by different
communities and which later becomes a matter of pride and identity of those communities.
By contrast, in a perspective based on individual profit (where language and language learning
is seen through the lens of gaining profit), learning another language is acquiring a skill that
will enable learners to gain access to resources that give them more social power, and more
freedom to play with the constraints imposed by the social and cultural structures of society.
Language is seen less for its use value than for its exchange value, i.e., it gives its users a profit
of distinction on the market of symbolic exchanges. While learners may learn a language less
to read its literature in the original than to gain an edge on the job market or in the competition
to enter graduate school, pride and profit need not be exclusive from one another. Pride in one’s
knowledge of the literate culture may be turned into a profit for foreign language learners
seeking employment and commercial profit can boost the ethnic pride of heritage language
learners.
In the new global era, knowing more than one language increases one’s potential in
understanding signs and the ability to create one’s own identity that is blended and up for
change (Norton, 2000). Obviously, when individuals understand language in their own way
and create identities for themselves based on their perceptions the meaning changes and
remains a variable. This does not sit well with the historical and material realities that form the
basis of the idea of communication, language and culture in local contexts. Being bi- or
multilingual i.e. knowing two or more languages meant resignification of the three and not a
complete shift or restructuring the very knowledge that we research and teach. If
communication, language and culture have to be seen in a different light or conception then
this must be based on a postmodernist framework that is used below.
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9.5 Communication

In communicative language teaching in the eighties, communication was understood as the

‘interpretation, expression, and negotiation’ of intended meanings and language learning was
seen as ‘learning how to communicate as a member of a particular socio-cultural group’.
Communication was seen as not only following the social conventions of the group but ‘also
of negotiating through and about the conventions themselves’. It thus included a strong element
of reflexivity in an attempt to interpret and negotiate cross-cultural differences, a two-way
exchange of views on how to proceed. Under the influence of global media, neo-liberal
ideology, and the proliferation of electronic social networks, communication across cultures
has come to mean less an arduous effort at interpretation and negotiation of intended meanings
than social contact and the sharing of what Castells calls ‘the value of communication’ itself.

Human contact has become less dependent on face-to-face interaction and happens increasingly
online. This interaction happens not for the sharing of cultural values or a deep engagement
with difference, but for phatic communion (maintaining social relations), displays of
knowledge or affection, impression management, and group affiliation or identification.
Communication in this new age has become mostly: presentation of self, participation,
playfulness, and an increased tendency to use multiple codes and modalities to bring one’s
message across. But there is a concern that due to this shift in the understanding of language
learning FL learning is becoming impoverished (deprived of strength/weak). The growing
commodification of English as a global skill risks spreading to other languages that might also
be learned not as cultural but as instrumental languages, unless they are heritage languages. In
answer to the question: ‘Is English as a lingua franca a threat to national languages and to
multilingualism?’, some scholars, like Juliane House, see a welcome division between
‘languages for communication’ and ‘languages for identification’.

According to her, English as a lingua franca (ELF) is linked not so much to a speech community
as to a ‘community of practice’, characterized by ‘mutual engagement, joint negotiated
enterprise and a shared repertoire of negotiable resources’. As such, ELF ‘can be seen as
strengthening the complementary need for native local languages that are rooted in their
speakers’ shared history, cultural tradition, practices, conventions, and values as identificatory
potential’. The risk, however, is that it might devalue native local languages precisely by
confining them to the local while confirming the pre-eminence of English on the global stage.
Communication in a global age is thus both transmission of facts and participation, both sharing
of content and self-positioning. It is as much about acquiring a voice and making yourself
heard, as it is about negotiating differences in intended meaning.

For L2 learners, it is about the construction and re-construction of selves in dialogue with
others. The emancipatory potential (freedom in) of such a concept of communication and its
potential for greater power and control is what make it unique from its modernist counterpart
that saw communication mainly as an exchange of factual information.

9.6 Language
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Second language acquisition research has been predicated on the notion that the target language
is a coherent (logical), intricate (complicated) linguistic system that is to be acquired
incrementally (in stages) over several years following natural sequences of acquisition in
interaction with speakers of the language. A learner’s interlanguage has been viewed as
approximating ever more closely the language of the native speaker (NS). To the development
of grammatical competence communicative language teaching added a sociolinguistic,
pragmatic, discourse, and strategic competence that understands language as language-in-use.
Besides grammatical and lexical structures, language came to also include speech functions,
politeness strategies, discourse skills such as cohesion, genre, and register manipulation,
schemas of interaction and interpretation, learning and communication strategies, and literacy
practices of various kinds.

While modernist conceptions of language learning still consider the monolingual NS as the
model language user and the target of instruction, late modernist views have problematized the
monolingual speaker as an appropriate model for a learner who, by definition, is striving to
become bilingual, not doubly monolingual. In a global world of multilingual encounters, is it
even desirable to teach the totality of one linguistic system? SLA researchers like Lourdes
Ortega have reconceptualized SLA research as an apprenticeship in bilingualism and most
foreign language educators today would agree that learning another language is learning to
make meaning in multiple ways, not just in a different code (English, French, German) but also
indifferent modes (spoken, written, virtual) and modalities (verbal, visual, musical). Some
researchers argue that what L2 learners need in a global world is not knowledge of whole
linguistic systems, but a variety of linguistic repertoires, also called as ‘truncated repertoires’
or ‘disposable linguistic resources’ that can be activated according to the needs of the moment.

Where does all this leave the language learner in the twenty-first century? The growing
diversification of learners’ needs, interests and opportunities around the world have made it
difficult to use the same definition of language in all FL learning contexts. For some, language
will be seen as a skill to establish contact, make friends, and participate in global exchanges
using a variety of verbal and non-verbal resources. For others, language will be the means to
enter another cultural community in a specific local context. Where it will be seen as giving
access to the high culture of literature and the arts. These different conceptions of what
language is do not easily map out on different levels of instruction. For example, some schools
are primarily interested in providing skills for the immediate job market while others are more
interested in giving their students an all purpose general education. Each educational context
requires a different pedagogic approach and different criteria of success, the need to localize
methods and materials and train teachers to deal with a variety of contexts of language use.

9.7 Culture

As mentioned earlier, before the 1980s getting to know a foreign culture was understood to be
the purpose of foreign language learning. Culture was understood to be a sum of material
artefacts, customs of everyday life, often called ‘food, fairs and folklore’ and was therefore
seen as rather separate from language. Due to the increased pressure to provide learners with a
usable language proficiency or communicative competence, language teachers increasingly
complained of a lack of time to teach culture - communicative activities in the classroom took
up so much of lesson time! Many students themselves resented having culture forced upon
them when all they wanted was the ability to communicate and interact with young people from
around the world. Thus, despite decades of research on the nature and the role of culture in FL
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learning, there is still a great deal of ambiguity regarding the obligation to teach culture in
foreign language classrooms.

However, advances in cognitive science, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology in the

last twenty years have brought the teaching of language and the teaching of culture closer
together. It is now a widely recognized fact that language and thought are closely related to one
another in the brain and that we apprehend reality through conceptual metaphors expressed in
verbal terms. The words we use to characterize people, things, and events are in fact categories
of the mind that reveal a great deal about a speaker’s way of cutting up and thus of making
sense of social reality. Culture is no longer just the objective way of life of a certain speech
community but the subjective way in which the members of that community give meaning to
events. It’s the meaning that constitutes the culture, not the artefacts themselves.

That meaning is sometimes conventionalized through schooling, the media and commercial
stereotypes, but most of the time it is idiosyncratic (depended on an individual’s behavior),
emerging from dialogic interaction among people in conversation. As a result of which, it
remains flexible (can be changed) and people’s understanding. The current perplexity
(hesitation) of language teachers regarding the teaching of culture is a sign of how hybrid
(mixed or blended) national cultures have become, how fluid the boundaries are now between
lived culture and the culture represented on the screen - between the real and the virtual. What
Thurlow and Jaworski call ‘tourism discourse’ has permeated the textbooks and the websites
of the internet. As a metaphor for a neoliberal mindset, tourism discourse denotes less actual
tourists’ ways of talking than a way of interacting with places and people based on playful,
fleeting encounters without any desire to negotiate, let alone resolve, differences in meaning.
It encourages a tourist gaze that ‘seeks encounters not relationships, contact not engagement,
service not commitment’. This sobering view of culture is countered by language educators
who applaud the greater accessibility of foreign cultures provided by computer environments
and their promise of ‘authentic’ human contact. But beyond contact, engaging with and
understanding other world-views has become a much more complex endeavour given the
growing diversity and semiotic uncertainty both within nations and among different
communities, groups, and generations.

In sum: the twenty-first-century view of FL learning captured in this section has been called
‘postmodernist’ in that it assumes a relational, subjective link between language and culture. It
is predicated on the following tenets:

➢ Language is a social semiotic that both expresses and constructs emergent thoughts, a
process in which identities are constructed through repeated subject positionings
according to the demands of the situation.

➢ The meaning of words depends on who speaks to whom about what under which
circumstances.

➢ Communication is an attempt to shape a context in which words will help categorize

social reality and evoke meanings that will, it is hoped, be shared among the
participants.

➢ Cultures are portable schemas of interpretation of actions and events that people have
acquired through primary socialization and which change over time as people migrate
or enter into contact with people who have been socialized differently.
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➢ Cultures can be compared only if the totality of their contexts of use is taken into
account.

➢ Communities in an era of globalization have become too hybrid and too complex to
have well-defined rules of behaviours that need to be observed if communication is to
proceed smoothly.

Pragmatic appropriateness must now be negotiated on a case by case basis. Postmodernist

views have not replaced modernist views on language and culture. Even though modernist
views might not correspond to the current global reality, they still survive and get resignified
in the memories of teachers, textbooks, movies and novels; they are reproduced in marketing
stereotypes and brand logos.

9.8 Conclusion

Over the last thirty years, globalization has greatly affected the way we think and talk about
language and culture in FL learning. With the mobility of good and people across the globe
and easy access to people and culture through social networks, language and culture have
changed their meaning and how people perceive them today. This change is exciting because
of its broad reach but at the same time it is worrisome. On the one hand, globalization ensures
participation, togetherness, close contact, harmony, contact and connections, plurality of voices
and human agency. While making way for people to be heard and change the culture of their
everyday lives, This, as a result, can change the power dynamics and limit monopoly to
maintain balance between haves and have nots. On the other hand, globalization has also made
language a commercial entity – something to earn profit from (diminishing its cultural and
exchange value) which has increased the sense of competitiveness and the need for greater and
more invisible power and control.
If culture is redefined as a meaning-making process, then it has to be understood as the sum of
individual practices in different contexts. These practices mainly depend on the individual
speakers and writers who use language and other symbolic systems for communication.
Language teachers, who have to teach both the standard language and its variations in discourse
cannot help but teach culture (which becomes unavoidable), even in its stereotypical forms.
The challenge is how to seize the moment to move the students from the security of the
stereotype to its exhilarating but risky variations, and how to engage them with the differences
in world-views that take place because of these variations.
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9.9 Assessment Questions

1. Define what is meant by Foreign Language Learning and Culture?

2. Discuss the five C’s in Foreign Language Learning.

3. How is culture affected by globalization?

4. What is the modern understanding of culture?

5. What is the post-modernist view of culture, language and communication?

6. Define what is meant by ‘truncated repertoires’ or ‘disposable linguistic resources’?