Word and Culture

Word and Culture

A few words are necessary concerning what I mean by ‘culture.’ I do not

intend to use the term culture in the sense of ‘high culture,’ i.e., the appreciation

of music, literature, the arts, and so on. Rather, I intend to use it in the sense

of whatever a person must know in order to function in a particular society.

Various aspects/approaches of word and culture

1. Whorf

2. Kindship

3. Color

4. Taxonomies

5. Prototypes

6. Taboo words and Euphemism

Kindship

One interesting way in which people use language in daily living is to refer to various kinds of kin. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a considerable literature on kinship terminology, describing how people in various parts of the world refer to relatives by blood (or descent) and marriage Kinship systems are a universal feature of languages, because kinship is so important t in social organisation. Some systems are much richer than others, but all make use of such factors as gender, age, generation, blood, and marriage in their organization One of the attractions that kinship systems have for investigators is that these factors are  fairly readily ascertainable.

Taxonimoes

Analyses into taxonomies s and components are useful in that they help us to organize data in ways that appear to indicate how speakers use their language to organize the world around them The analyses show how systematic

much of that behavior is and do so in a rather surprising way. This is talk about hierarchy in a situation, for example like in animal.

Color

Our world is a world of color but the amount of color varies from place to place and time to time. A January flight from Acapulco, Mexico, to Toronto, Canada, takes one from a sun-drenched array of colors to a gray drabness. Except to those blinded to it, color is all around but it is not everywhere treated in the same way The terms people use to describe color give us another means of exploring the relationships between different languages and cultures. The color spectrum is a physical continuum showing no breaks at all. All languages make use of basic color terms. A basic color term must be a single word, e.g., blue or yellow, not some combination of words, e.g., light blue or pale yellow. Nor must it be the obvious sub-division of some higher-order term, as both crimson and scarlet are of red. It must have quite general use; i.e., it must not be applied only to a very narrow range of objects, as, for example, blond is applied in English almost exclusively to the color of hair and wood. Also, the term must not be highly restricted in the sense that it is used by only a specific sub-set of speakers, such as interior decorators or fashion writers.

Prototypes

a prototype-based concept can be learned on the basis of a very small number of instances – perhaps a single one – and without any kind of formal definition, whereas a feature-based definition would be very much harder to learn since a much larger number of cases, plus a number of non-cases, would be needed before the learner could work out which features were necessary and which were not. Moreover, such a view allows for a more flexible approach to understanding how people actually use language. In that usage certain concepts are necessarily ‘fuzzy,’ as the theory predicts they will be, but that very fuzziness allows speakers to use language creatively. According to Hudson, prototype theory may even be applied to the social situations in which speech occurs. He suggests that, when we hear a new linguistic item, we associate with it who typically seems to use it and what, apparently, is the typical occasion of its use. Again, we need very few instances – even possibly just a single one – to be able to do this. Of course, if the particular is atypical and we fail to recognize this fact, we could be in for some discomfort at a later time when we treat it as typical.

Taboo and Euphemism

Taboo is the prohibition or avoidance in any society of behavior believed to be harmful to its members in that it would cause them anxiety, embarrassment, or shame. It is an extremely strong politeness constraint. Consequently, so far as language is concerned, certain things are not to be said or certain objects can be referred to only in certain circumstances, for example, only by certain people, or through deliberate circumlocutions, i.e., euphemistically. Of course, there are always those who are prepared to break the taboos in an attempt to show their own freedom from such social constraints or to expose the taboos as irrational and unjustified, as in certain movements for ‘free speech.’ English also has its taboos, and most people who speak English know what these are and observe the ‘rules.’ When someone breaks the rules, that rupture may arouse considerable comment, although not perhaps quite as much today as formerly, as when Shaw’s use of bloody in Pygmalion or the use of damn in the movie Gone with the Wind aroused widespread public comment. Standards and norms change. Linguistic taboos are also violated on occasion to draw attention to oneself, or to show contempt, or to be aggressive or provocative, or to mock authority – or, according to Freud, on occasion as a form of verbal seduction, e.g., ‘talking dirty.’ The penalty for breaking a linguistic taboo can be severe, for blasphemy and obscenity are still crimes in many jurisdictions, but it is hardly likely to cost you your life, as the violation of certain non-linguistic taboos, e.g., incest taboos, might in certain places in the world.