Engl与ish and Society.ppt

Language and society;1. The scope of sociolinguistics 1.1 Indications of relatedness between language and society ; An obvious indication of the inter-relationship between language and society is the fact that language is not always used to exchange information as is generally assumed, but rather it;Another indication is that users of the same language in a sense all speak differently. The kind of language each of them chooses to use is in part;there are many examples of the physical environment in which a society lives being reflected in its language, normally in the structure of its lexicon---the way in which distinctions are made by means of single words. ;Whereas English, for example, has only one word for snow ( or two if we include sleet), Eskimo has several. The reasons for this are obvious. It is essential for Eskimos to be able to distinguish efficiently;English, of course, is quite able to make the same distinctions: fine snow, dry snow, soft snow, and so on, but in Eskimos this sort of distinction is lexicalized---made by means of individual words.;The social environment can also be reflected in language, and can often have an effect on the structure of the vocabulary. For example, a societys kinship;We can assume, for example, that the important kin relationships in English-speaking societies are those that are signaled by single vocabulary items. ;As society is reflected in language in this way, social change can produce a corresponding linguistic change. ;This has happened in the case of Russian. During the period from 1860 to the present day the structure of the Russian kinship system has undergone a very radical change as a result of several important events:;For example:the emancipation of serfs in 1861, the First World War, the revolution, the collectivization of agriculture and the Second world War. There has been a marked social as well as political revolution, and this has been accompanied by a corresponding change in the language. ;In