9.lanuage and culture.ppt

Chapter 9 Language and Culture 1 What is culture? 2 The relationship b.w. language and culture 3 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 4 Linguistic evidence of cultural differences （for self-study） 5 The significance of cultural teaching and learning 6 Cultural overlap and diffusion 7 Intercultural communication (P125) Please translate the following sentences into Chinese: 1. Where there is fear, there is modesty. 2. Modest dogs miss much meal. 3. The lady went up the aisle with one man and came back with another. 1. Language expresses and embodies cultural reality, reflecting the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks, etc.. 2. The culture both emancipates and constrains people socially, historically and metaphorically through their interactions with other members of the same group. (discourse community accents) 3. Language plays a major role in socializing the people and in perpetuating culture, especially in print form. 4. Culture also affects its people’s imagination or common dreams which are mediated through the language and reflected in their life. 5. Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. What do you think the relation between language and thought is? Language is the outward form of thought. Thought exists independently of language since people can exchange their thought through ways other than language. A very influential and extremely controversial theory concerning language and thought: linguistic determinism 语言决定论: all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language. Or put it more bluntly, language determines thought. linguistic relativism 语言相对论: speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently, i.e. relative to their linguistic background. There is no limit to the structural diversity of language. The hypothesis may be typically represented by the statement “If Aristotle had spoken Chinese, his logic would have been different.” If follows from this strong versio