The relationship of language and culture

The relationship of language and culture

Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When it is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways.

1) Language expresses cultural reality. The words people utter refer to the common experience. They express facts, ideas, events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. Words also reflect their authors’ attitudes and beliefs, their point of view.

2) Language embodies cultural reality. But members of a community or social group do not only express experience; they also create experience through language. The way in which people use the spoken, written, or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the group they belong to, for example, through a speaker’s tone of voice, accent, conversational style, gestures and facial expressions.

3) Language symbolizes cultural reality. Language is a system of signs that is seen as having itself a cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity.

Nature, culture, language

One way of thinking about culture is to contrast it with nature. Nature refers to what is born and grows originally (Latin “nascere” – to be born); culture refers to what has been grown and groomed (Latin “colere” – to cultivate).

 

Emily Dickinson

Essential Oils – are wrung –

The Attar from Rose

Be not expressed by Suns – alone

It is the gift of Screws –

 

The General Rose – decay –

But this – in Lady’s Drawer

Make Summer – When the lady lie

In Ceaseless Rosemary –

 

The poem expresses in a stylized way the relationship of nature, culture, and language. A rose in a flower bed (The General Rose - generic) is a phenomenon of nature – beautiful, but faceless and nameless among the same species. Perishable. Forgettable. Nature alone cannot reveal nor preserve the particular beauty of a particular rose at a chosen moment in time. Nature can only make summer when the season is right. Culture is not bound by biological time. Through a sophisticated technology, logical procedure, developed especially to extract the essence of roses, culture forces nature to reveal its essential potentialities. The word Screws suggests that this process is not without labour. By crushing the petals, a great deal of the rose must be lost in order to get its essence. The same is the technology of the word. It selects among the many potential meanings that a rose might have. Culture makes the rose petals into a rare perfume, purchased at high cost, for a particular, personal use of a particular lady. The Lady may die, but the fragrance of the rose’s essence (the Attar) can make it immortal, in the same manner as the language of the poem immortalizes both the rose and the lady, and brings both back to life in the imagination of its readers. The word has immortalized nature. The nature and culture need each other.

 

Particular meanings are adopted by the speech communities and imposed in turn on its members. E.g. once a bouquet of roses has become codified as a society’s way of expressing love, it becomes risky for lovers to express their love without resorting to the symbols that their society imposes upon them, and to offer chrysanthemums as a sign of love (which in Germany are reserved for the dead).

The screws that language and culture impose on nature correspond to various forms of socialization and acculturation. Etiquette, expressions of politeness, social dos and donts shape people’s behavior through behavioral upbringing, schooling, professional training. These ways with language, or norms of interaction and interpretation, form part of invisible ritual imposed by culture on language users.

 

Imagined communities

These two layers of culture combined, the social (synchronic) and the historical (diachronic), have often been called the sociocultural context of language study. The third layer is imagination. Discourse communities are characterized not only by facts and artifacts, but by common dreams, fulfilled and unfulfilled imaginings. These imaginings are mediated through the language.

Insiders/outsiders

To identify themselves as members of a community, people have to define themselves jointly as insiders against the others, outsiders. There is a hegemonic effect of dominant cultures in representing the Other. Knowledge itself is coloured by the social and historical context n which it is acquired and disseminated.

In the social, the historic, and the imagined dimension, culture is heterogeneous. Members of the same discourse community all have different biographies and life experiences, they may differ in age, gender, or ethnicity, they have different political opinions. Cultures change over time.

 

 

In summary, culture can be defined as membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings.

1. Culture is always the result of human intervention in the biological process of nature.

2. Culture both liberates and constrains. It liberates by investing the randomness of nature with meaning, order, and rationality and by providing safeguards against chaos; it constrains by imposing a structure on nature and by limiting the range of possible meanings created by the individual.

3. Culture is the product of socially and historically situated discourse communities, that are to a large extent imagined communities, created and shaped by language.

4. A community’s language and its material achievements represent a social patrimony and a symbolic capital that serve to perpetuate relationship of power and domination; they distinguish insiders from outsiders.

5. Cultures are fundamentally heterogeneous and changing, they are a constant site of struggle for recognition and legitimation.

 

Linguistic relativity

In the 19th century scholars put forward the idea that different people speak differently because they think differently, and they think differently because their language offers them different ways of expressing the world around them. This notion was picked up by Franz Boas (1858-1942), and subsequently by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941).

Meaning as sign

Language can mean in two fundamental ways, both of which are intimately linked to culture: through what it says or what it refers to as an encoded sign (semantics), and through what it does as an action in context (pragmatics).

The linguistic sign

The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is humans’ capacity to create signs that mediate between them and their environment. Every meaning-making practice makes use of two elements: a signifier and a signified. Thus, for example, the sound [rouz] or the four letters of the word “rose” are signifiers for a concept related to an object in the real world with a thorny stem and many petals. The signifier (sound or word) in itself is not a sign unless someone recognizes it as such and relates it to a signified (concept); for example, for someone who does not know English, the sound signifies nothing because it is not a sign, but only a meaningless sound. A sign is therefore neither the word itself nor the object it refers to but the relation between the two.

There is nothing necessary about the relation between a given word as a linguistic signifier and a signified object. The word “rose” can be related to flowers of various shapes, consistencies, colours and smells, it can also refer to a colour, or to a smell. Conversely, the object “rose” can be given meaning by a variety of signifiers: Morning Glory, Madame Meillon, flower, die Rose, une rose. Because there is nothing inherent in the nature of a rose that makes the four letters of itσ English signifier more plausible than the five letters of the Greek word ροδον, the linguistic sign has been called arbitrary. Furthermore, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, the dualism of the linguistic sign has been called asymmetrical.

The meanings of signs

The words are the referents of objects. Their meaning that can be looked up in the dictionary is denotative. On the other hand, the meaning of the word is linked to the many associations they evoke in the minds (rose – love, passion, beauty). These are connotations. The meaning can be also iconic. An iconic meaning of words based on resemblance of words to reality, e.g. onomatopoeia. It is the image of the object signified. Exclamations like “Whoops!”, “Wow!”, “Whack!” don’t so much refer to the emotions or actions as they imitate them (onomatopoeia).

Cultural encodings

Code is a formal system of communication. The experience can be encoded differently by different discourse communities. For example, table, Tisch, mesa denote the same object by reference to a piece of furniture, but whereas the English sign “table” denotes all tables, Polish encodes dining tables as stol, coffee tables or telephone tables as stolik. British English encodes anything south of the diaphragm as “stomach”, whereas in American English a “stomachache” denotes something different from a “bellyache”. Similarly, Bavarian German encodes the whole leg from the hip to the toes through one sign, das Bein, whereas English needs at least three words “hip”, “leg”, or “foot”. Cultural encodings can change over time in the same language. For example, German that used to encode a state of happiness as glűcklich, now encodes deep happiness as glűcklich, superficial happiness as happy.

E.g. stone falls.

The encoding of experience differs also in the nature of the cultural associations evoked by different linguistic signs. For example, although the words “soul” and “mind” are usually seen as the English equivalents of the Russian word “душа”, each of these signs is differently associated with their respective objects. For a Russian, “душа” is used more frequently than “soul” and “mind” in English. And through its associations with religion, goodness, and the mystical essence of things it connotes quite a different concept than the English.

Душа –

· бессмертное духовное существо, одаренное разумом и волею (человек с духом и телом – ни души нет дома; у него сто душ крестьян; прописные души – пропущенные в народной переписи; мертвые души – умершие в промежуток между двумя переписями, но числящиеся по уплате податей / человек бестелесный по смерти своей – отдать богу душу; положить душу – жизнь, заложить за к-л душу – ручаться; на душе легко/тяжело; отпусти душу на покаяние – не губи напрасно, дай пожить; в чем душа держится)

· душевные и духовные качества человека, совесть, внутреннее чувство – человек с слабою душой; взять на душу; в его сочинениях много души; быть душой компании; душа-человек; душа не на месте – тревожиться; отвести душу – утешиться; жить душа в душу; у меня дело это на душе лежит – забота не дает покоя; это на твоей душе – совести; покривить душой – поступить против совести; затаить в душе – держать в тайне; душа замирает – лишаюсь чувств; на душу мутит, с души тянет – делается дурно; душа не принимает этого; душа меру знает; рад душой, от души – искренне; души не чаять; по душе; лезть в душу; за душой ничего нет; плоть душе ворог; грешное тело и душу съело; свет в храме от свечи, а в душе от молитвы; муж голова, жена душа; покуда душа жива; хоть шуба овечья, да душа человечья; хоть мошна пуста, да душа чиста; стоять над душой; душа божья, голова царская, спина барская; своя душа не холоп; у немца ножки тоненьки, душа коротенька; душа пузыри пускает – отрыгивается; в чужую душу не влезешь; чужая душа потемки; человек видим, а душа нет; сколько душе угодно; душа не принимает, а глаза все больше просят; душу вынуть.

· ямочка на шее над грудною костью

· душечка, душевный, душить, душистый, душник, душный, душевредный, душепагубный, душегуб, душеприказчик.

Anna Wierzbicka Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Are emotions universal or culture-specific? According to Izard and Buechler (1980) the fundamental emotions are 1) interest, 2) joy, 3) surprise, 4) sadness, 5) anger, 6) disgust, 7) contempt, 8) fear, 9) shame/shyness and 10) guilt. These emotions are identified by means of English words. Polish does not have a word corresponding exactly to “disgust”. An Australian Aboriginal language, Gidjingali, does not lexically distinguish “fear” from “shame”, they have one lexical item.

Studies of the semantic networks of bilingual speakers make these associations visible. For example, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish have been shown to activate different associations within one of their languages and across their two languages. In English they would associate “house” with “window”, and “boy” with “girl”, but in Spanish they may associate casa with madre, and muchacho with hombre. But even within the same speech community, signs might have different semantic values for people from different discourse communities. Anglophone readers of Dickinson’s poem who happen to not to be members of her special discourse community, might not know the denotational meaning of the word “Attar”, nor associate “rosemary” with the dead. Nor might be iconic aspects of the poem be evident to them (“s”). Even though they may be native speakers of English, their cultural literacy is different from that of Emily Dickinson’s intended readers.

Words can also serve as culturally informed icons for the concepts, objects, or person they signify. For example, English speakers may intensify denotative meanings by iconically elongating the vowel of a word: “It’s beau::::::::tiful!” In French intensification of the sound is often done not through elongation of the vowel but through rapid reiteration of the same form:”Vite vite vite vite vite! (quick)”. These different prosodic encodings form distinct way of speaking viewed as typically English or French. Similarly, onomatopoeia links objects and sounds in seemingly inevitable ways for members of a given culture. For example, the English sounds “bash”, “mash”, “smash”, “crash”, “dash”, “lash”, “clash”, “trash”, “splash”, “flash” are for English speakers icons for sudden violent movement or action. A speaker of another language might not hear in the sound [æʃ] any such icon at all. Think of the sounds the animals produce.

It is important to mention that the differences noted above among the different languages are not only differences in the code itself, but in the semantic meanings attributed to these different encodings by language-using communities. It is these meanings that make the linguistic sign into a cultural sign.

 

Semantic cohesion

As a sign, a word also relates to other words or signs that give it a particular value in the verbal text itself or co - text. Beyond individual nouns and sounds, words refer to other words by a variety of cohesive devices that hold the text (pronouns, demonstratives, repetition of the same words from one sentence to the next, or same sounds, recurrence of words that relate to the same idea, conjunctions. These devices capitalize on the associative meanings or shared connotations of a particular community of competent readers who readily recognize the referent. Semantic cohesion depends on a discourse community’s communal associations.

A sign or a word may also relate to the other words or instances of text and talk that have accumulated in a community’s memory over time, or prior text. Russian word dusha denotes “a person’s inner core”, it connotes goodness and truth because it is linked to other utterances spoken and heard in daily life, to literary quotes (e/g/ from Dostoyevsky “His soul overflowing with rapture, he yearned for freedom, space, openness”), or to other verbal concepts such as pricelessness, human will, inner speech, knowledge, feeling, thoughts, religion, that themselves have a variety of connotations. When English speakers translate the word dusha by the word soul, they are linking it to other English words (“disembodied spirit”, “immortal self”, “emotions”), that approximate but don’t quite match the semantic cohesion established for the word in the Russian culture. The meanings of words cannot be separated from other with which they have come to be associated in the discourse community’s semantic pool.

Another linguistic environment within which words carry cultural semantic meaning consists of the linguistic metaphors that have accumulated over time in a community’s store of semantic knowledge. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors we Live By: Culture is encoded not only in the semantic structures of a language, but also in its idiomatic expressions that both reflect and direct the way we think. Different languages predispose their speakers to view reality in different ways through the different metaphors they use. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR.

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticism was right on the target.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him.

You disagree? OK, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out!

He shot down all of my arguments!

We don’t just talk about argument in terms of war. We see the person we are arguing with as opponent. It is a verbal battle. It structures the actions we perform.

Some of these metaphors are inscribed in the very structure of the English code, for example, the metaphor of the visual field as container. This metaphor delineates what is inside it, outside it, comes into it (“The ship is coming into view”, “I have him in sight”, “He is out of sight now”.

 

Symbols

Symbol is a conventionalized sign that has been endowed with special meaning by the members of a given culture. With the passing time, signs easily become not only naturalized, but conventionalized as well. Taken out of their original social and historical context, linguistic signs can be emptied of the fullness of their meaning and used as symbolic shorthand. For example, words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “choice”, when uttered by politicians and diplomats, may lose much of their denotative and even their rich connotative meanings, and become political symbols in Western democratic rhetoric; signifiers “the French Revolution”, “the Holocaust” have simplified an originally confusing amalgam of historical events conventionalized symbols. The reccurence of these symbols over time creates an accumulation of meaning that not only shapes the memory of sign users but confers to these symbols mythical weight and validity.

Cultural stereotypes are frozen signs that affect both those who use them and those whom they serve to characterize. Much of what we call ideology is symbolic language. For example, words like “rebels” or “freedom fighters” to denote anti-government forces, “challenges” or “problems” to denote obstacles, “collaboration” or “exploitation” to denote labour, are cultural symbols propagated and sustained by sign-makers of different political meanings in their respective discourse communities. Th eway in which language intersects with social power makes some users of cultural signs seem legitimate, i.e. natural, others illegitimate, unnatural and even taboo. A right-wing newspaper would censor the use of “freedom fighters” to refer to guerrilla forces; its readers would find it quite natural to see them referred to as “rebels”.

Summary

· Signs establish between words and things various semantic relations of denotation, connotation, or iconicity that give general meaning to the world.

· Signs establish semantic relations with other signs in the direct environment of verbal exchanges, or in the historical context of a discourse community.

· The creation of meaning through signs is not arbitrary, but is guided by the human desire for recognition, influence, power, and the general motivation for social and cultural survival.

· It is difficult to draw a clear line between the generic semantic meanings of the code and the pragmatic meanings of the code in various contexts of use.

 

Meaning as action

Structures of expectation

Structures of expectations are mental structures of knowledge that enable us to understand present events and anticipate future ones. Language users bring to any verbal encounter blueprints for action that have developed through their socialization or acculturation in a given society. From childhood on they have learned to realize certain speech acts in culturally appropriate manner, like saying “Thank you” in response to receiving a gift, and “Goodbye” as a way of closing encounters; they have learned to speak differently to people of different ranks and to distinguish an insult from a compliment. These behaviours have become second nature to them because they are grounded in their physical experience around them. This experience filters their perception and their interpretation of the world.

Language users have not only learned to interpret signs and to act upon them; they have also learned to expect certain behaviours of others as well. In the same manner as they expect cars to stop at a STOP sign and pedestrians to be able to cross the street at a WALK sign, so too they expect to be greeted upon a first encounter, to be listened to when they speak, to have their questions answered. There are cultural differences in these expectations. French speakers from France may expect to be greeted with a handshake, Americans may expect a smile instead; a professor may expect to be greeted differently from a student, a friend from a stranger. On the basis of their experience in their culture, they organize knowledge about the world and use this knowledge to predict interpretations and relationships regarding any new information, events, and experiences that come their way. The general structure of expectation established in people’s minds by the culture they live in have been called frames. Frame is a culturally determined behavioral prototype that enables us to interpret each other’s instances of verbal and non-verbal behavior.

Pragmatic coherence

Efforts to make the words uttered meaningful within the situational and cultural context of the exchange are efforts to establish pragmatic coherence. Coherence is created in the minds of the speakers and hearers by the inferences they make based on the words they hear. Thus, semantic coherence relates word to word, pragmatic coherence relates speaker to speaker within the large cultural context of communication.

An African-American student has been sent to interview a black housewife in a low-income, inner-city neighborhood. The contact has been made over the phone by someone in the office. The student arrives, rings the bell, and is met by the husband, who opens the door, smiles, and steps towards him:

Husband: So y’re gonna check out ma ol lady, hah?

Student: Ah, no. I only came to get some information. They called from the office.

(Husband, dropping his smile, disappears without a word and calls his wife).

Failing to infer from the husband’s stylistic cues (intonation, pronunciation typical of Black English Vernacular, lexical choice) – the husband’s offered solidarity from one Afro-American to another, the student responds in White Standard English showing that he is from an academic culture. The interview was stiff and quite unsatisfactory. In this case student had to choose between his identity as an Afro-American and his identity as a professional academic.

Between people from different national cultures, the same contextualization cues may lead to different inferences and may occasion serious misunderstandings, since they tend to be attributed to personal attitudes or character traits. The resulting lack of pragmatic coherence generally leaves the participants baffled and perplexed, or frustrated and angry.

The co-operative principle

A term coined by the philosopher Paul Grice to characterize the basic expectation that participants in informational exchanges will co-operate with one another by contributing appropriately and in a timely manner to the conversation. People can generally assume that in conversations in which, for example, the exchange of information is primary, speakers will not say more than is necessary for the purpose of exchange and will say what is necessary to convey the information required. They generally expect that what their interlocutor says is relevant to the topic at hand; that the message will be clear and understandable; and under normal circumstances she/he will not state something which is not true. The expectations of speakers and hearers in informational exchanges are in part shaped by these maxims of the co-operative principle in conversation.

Speakers from different cultural backgrounds may have different interpretations of what it means to be true, relevant, brief or clear with regard to conversations. They may have different definitions of the speech activity itself.

Summary

· The system of signs that constitute culture is actively constructed through the verbal actions taken by sign-makers in interaction with one another. In the construction of meaning, the interpretation of events is grounded in each person’s experience and field of perception.

· The context of situation and the context of culture in which verbal actions take place are constitutive of these actions; they imbue them with necessary pragmatic coherence.

· The participants maintain this verbal coherence by observing a principle of co-operation, that prompts them to align their expectations onto those of others by playing various participant roles. All these actions by the participants are finely attuned to the cultural norms and conventions of the group they belong to.

· The meaning of words are different if they are conveyed face-to-face in the close proximity of another fellow human being, or over a distance, through writing and print.

Speech and writing

The very term orality is defined against written word and was coined by literate people within a context of literacy.

Characteristics of conversational speech:

1. Speech is transient, rather than permanent. Because of physical constraints, interlocutors may not speak at the same time, or else they cannot hear what the others say. Written language, by contrast, can be stored, retrieved, and recollected, and responses can be delayed. Moreover, the permanence of writing as a medium can easily lead people to suppose that what it expresses is permanent too, hence the important link between written documents and the law.

2. Speech is addictive or “rhapsodic”. Because of the dialogic nature of oral interaction, speakers “rhapsodize”, i.e. stitch together elements from previous turns-at-talk, they add language as they go along (and…and; then…), thus showing conversational cooperation in the building of their own turn. By contrast, the information conveyed in writing is hierarchically ordered within the clause structure, and is linearly arranged on the page, from left to right, or top to bottom, according to the cultural convention. Since it is likely to be read by distant, unknown, or yet-to-be-born audience, it has developed an information structure characterized by a high level of cohesion.

3. Speech is aggregative, i.e. it makes use of verbal aggregates or formulaic expressions, ready-made chunks of speech that maintain the contact between interlocutors, also called phatic communion. The term coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky to characterize the ready-made chunks of speech like “Hi, how are you?” that people use more to maintain social contact than to convey information. By contrast, in the absence of such direct contact and for the sake of economy of information over long distances or long periods of time, and because it can be read and re-read at will, writing has come to be viewed as the medium that fosters analysis, logical reasoning and abstract categorization.

4. Speech is redundant or “copious”. Because speakers are never quite sure whether their listener is listening, paying attention, comprehending and remembering what they are saying or not, they tend to make frequent use of repetition, paraphrase, and restatement. By contrast, since written language doesn’t have to make such demands on short-term memory, it tends to avoid redundancy.

5. Speech is loosely structured grammatically and is lexically sparse, writing, by contrast, is grammatically compact and lexically dense. Speakers have to attend to many aspects of the situation while they concentrate on what they are saying, and while they monitor the way they are saying it. Thus, their speech is characterized by false starts, filled and unfilled pauses, hesitations, parenthetic remarks, unfinished sentences. They create their utterances as they are speaking them. One way of keeping this balancing act is to use grammatical resources as best serves one’s immediate needs, and to leave the vocabulary as sparse as possible. Writers, by contrast, have time to pack as much information in the clause as they can, using all the complex syntactic resources the language can give them; they can condense large quantities of information in a tighter space by using, for example, dense nominalized phrases. WRITTEN Every previous visit had left me with a sense of the futility of further action on my part. / Improvements in technology have reduced the risks and high costs associated with simultaneous installation. SPOKEN Whenever I’d visited there before, I’d ended up feeling that it would be futile if I tried to do anything more. / Because the technology has improved, it’s less risky than it used to be when you install them at the same time, and it doesn’t cost so much either.

6. Speech tends to be people-centered, writing tends to be topic-centered. Because of the presence of an audience and the need to keep the conversation going, speakers not only focus on their topic, but try to engage their listeners as well, and appeal to their senses and emotions. In expository writing, by contrast, the topic or message and its transferability from one context to the other is the main concern. Writers of expository prose try to make their message as clear, unambiguous, coherent, and trustworthy as possible since they will not always be there to explain and defend it. Of course, other written texts, in particular of the literary or promotional kind, appeal to the reader’s emotions, and display many features characteristic of speech.

7. Speech, being close to the situation at hand, is context depended; writing, being received far from its original context of production, is context - reduced. Because of the dialogic character of oral exchanges, truth in the oral mode is jointly constructed and based on commonsense experience. Truth in the literate mode is based on the logic and the coherence of the argument being made.

The features listed above are not inherent in the spoken or in the written medium. Orality and literacy have to be seen on a continuum of more or less literate users of both spoken and written language. A scribbled memo, an e-mail, an information letter, like a conversation or a homily, are written in the orate mode; an academic lecture, a scientific presentation, like a scholarly article, are spoken in the literary mode.

The cognitive skills associated with literacy are not intrinsic to the technology of writing. Although the written medium does have its own physical parameters, there is nothing in alphabet and script that would make them more suited, say, for logical and analytic thinking than the spoken medium. To understand why literacy has become associated with logic and analysis, one needs to understand the historical association of the invention of the Greek alphabet with Plato’s philosophy, and the influence of Plato’s dichotomy between ideas and language on the whole of Western thought. It is cultural and historical contingency, not technology that determines the way we think, but technology serves to enhance and give power to one way of thinking over another. Technology is always linked to power, as power is linked to dominant cultures.

Indicating status

Deictic is an element of speech that points in a certain direction as viewed from the perspective of the speaker. (you, me, here, tomorrow..) Deixis is a process by which language indexes the physical, temporal, and social location of the speaker at the moment of utterance. Markers of social deixis give an indication not only of where the speaker stands in time and place but also of their status within the social structure, and of the status of speaker gives the addressee. For example, the use of vous or tu in French, Sie or du in German can index either power or solidarity, distance or closeness. English used to have you for distance, thou for closeness; now English has only retained the “you”, but social deixis in English expresses social position by other forms of address like Bill, Mister X, Professor X and the like. The forms can index a generational culture, or a culture that wants itself to be egalitarian and democratic as in informal forms of address used in the USA (dear friend, call me Bill). The police’s use of a non-reciprocal tu to address North African youth in France expresses an explicit display of power; being addressed as tu indexes the subordinate or marginal place occupied by these youths in French society today.

Social positionings

The use of social deictics like pronouns, forms of address, or names, is one way speakers align themselves to the cultural context as they understand it. Changes in intonation and pronunciation can also indicate changes in our perception of the role as a participant in an interaction, and in our alignment to others. Goffman calls such a positioning as footing, i.e. the stance we take up to ourselves and to the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of utterances. A change in footing is usually marked by a change in register, tone of voice or bodily orientation. For example, it is frequently the case in the USA that a Northerner talking to a Southerner instinctively aligns his/her way of talking on that of the Southerner, as a sign of conversational co-operation; similarly, a native speaker who starts adopting a style of speaking called “foreigner talk” when talking to a foreigner, shows a convergence that can be interpreted either as cultural solidarity or as the display of cultural power. We can see the same phenomenon occurring in classrooms. A teacher talks differently to her pupils when she addresses them as a class or as individual children. (1. Now listen everybody. 2. At ten o’clock we’ll have assembly. We’ll all go out together and go to the auditorium and sit in the first two rows. Mr. Dock, the principal, is going to speak to us. When he comes in, sit quietly and listen carefully. 3. Don’t wiggle your legs. Pay attention to what I’m saying). Mind the switch in tone and in the use of pronouns. Three different footings are involved here: the first statement is a claim on the children’s immediate behavior, the second is a review of experience to come, and the third a side remark to a particular child. The teacher, as a speaker, switches roles from being a principal (institutional voice) to being an animator of her students’ voices (we), to becoming an individual demanding to be listened to.

Defining one’s footing can be achieved through code-switching. It is a verbal strategy by which bilingual or bidialectal speakers change linguistic code within the same speech event as a sign of cultural solidarity or distance, and as an act of identity. (Tolstoy)

Changes in footing correspond to a change in the way we perceive events and are connected with a change in our frame for events. (Framing is an ability to apply a frame of interpretation to an utterance or speech event through a contextualization cue).

E.g. Discussions in the groups of American and Japanese students.

The American students perpetuate a discussion style typical of American academic culture, in which a problem posed at the outset gets tackled without further ado by whoever takes the initiative to start the discussion. The Japanese speakers negotiate not only the procedural aspects of the subsequent discussion, but also a hierarchical order within the group. The question of who speaks first is, in Japanese culture, of paramount importance. In all the Japanese group discussions, a female member started, followed by the other female member, than by the younger male member, and last by the oldest male member.

Protecting face

The ultimate aim of negotiating frames and footings in conversation is to protect one’s own and other participants’ face at all times. Face is a person’s social need to both belong to a group and be independent of that group.

Members of a cultural group need to feel respected and not impinged upon in their autonomy, pride, and self-sufficiency (negative face). They also need to be reinforced in their view of themselves as polite, considerate, respectful members of their culture (positive face). These two contradictory needs require delicate facework, since it is the interest of all participants in a verbal exchange that everyone maintain both their negative and positive face, so that the exchange can continue.

The negotiation of frames and footings and the facework accomplished in verbal encounters among members of a given social group gives rise to group-specific discourse styles. What distinguish people from different cultures are the different ways they use orate and literate discourse styles in various speech genres for various social purposes.

Conversational style

Conversational style is a person’s way of talking in the management of conversations. In face-to-face verbal exchanges, the choice of orate features of speech can give the participants a feeling of joint interpersonal involvement rather than the sense of detachment or objectivity that comes with the mere transmission of factual information. Different contexts of situation and different contexts of culture call for different conversational styles.

Compare, for example an interview, in which the purpose is to elicit information, and a conversation among friends, where the purpose is to share past experiences.

Interview between a journalist and a young apprentice in Germany:

A: and where do you work?

B: I work in the metal industry

A: uhuh… why did you choose that particular job? In the metal industry?

B: well… it was… so to speak… the job of my dreams. I wanted to work, but not particularly an intellectual job, but a more physical one

A: so… you can say that you chose that job yourself?

B: I chose that job myself

From the controlled, non-overlapping sequence of turns, the interviewer’s attempt at professional, detached objectivity, the cautious responses of the young apprentice desirous to be forthcoming with the required information, we recognize the typical style of a speech event called “interview” This literate journalistic style is quite different from the orate style one may find in a conversation among friends:

A: What I’ve been doing is cutting on my sleep

B: Oy!

A: And I’ve bee.. and I…

B: I do that too but it’s painful.

A: Yeah, 5-6 hours a night, and

B: Oh God how can you do it. You survive?

Here we can see personal involvement (paralinguistic signals like sighs and interjections, use of personal pronouns), empathy, frequent interruptions, overlaps – high degree of conversational cooperation.

The orate-literate continuum gets realized differently in different cultural genres, but also in different cultural traditions within one genre, such as classroom talk. For example, Indian children from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, who are used to learning by silently listening to and watching adults in their family, and by participating in social events within the community as a whole, have a notably different interactional behavior in the classroom than their Anglo-American peers and the teacher, even though all speak English. They mostly remain silent, do not respond to direct solicitations to display their knowledge in public, do not vie for the attention of the teacher, and seem more interested in working together with their peers.

People are able to display a variety of conversational styles in various situations, and one should avoid equating one person or one culture with one discourse style. However, by temperament and upbringing, people tend to prefer one or the other style in a given situation. This styl, in turn, forms part of their cultural identity and sense of self.

The problem in education, in particular, is how to combine different sets of values, different discourse and learning styles so as not to suppress anyone’s sense of worth, yet give everyone access to a dominant conversational style imposed by forces outside the local communities’ control.

Narrative style

The influence of culture on discourse style also becomes apparent in the different distribution of orate and literate feature of speech in story telling. For example, using the short “peer narrative” film by William Chafe, Tannen asked native speakers from Anglo-American and Greek background to retell the film in their own words. (It showed a man picking pears from a tree, then descending and dumping them into one of three baskets on the ground. A boy comes by on a bicycle and steals a basket of pears. As he’s riding away, he passes a girls on a bike, his hat flies off his head, and the bike overturns. Three boys appear and help him gather his pears. They find his hat and return it to him and he gives them pears. The boys then pass the farmer who has just come down from the three and discovered that his basket of pears is missing. He watches them walk by eating pears).

In comparing the narratives told by American women in English and Greek women in Greek. Each group had a distinctive narrative style. The Greeks told better stories, by often interweaving judgments about the character’s behavior, or about the film’s message. In contrast, the Americans reportedly gave a better recollection of the original sequence of events, and gave all the details they could remember. They used their judgment to comment on the filmmaker’s technique. The Greeks seemed to draw upon an interactive experience which was focused more on interpersonal involvement: telling the story in ways that would interest the interviewer, interpreting the film’s human message. The Americans seemed to draw on their wiliness to approach a school task for its own demands. They were focusing on the content of the film, treating it as a cinematic object, with critical objectivity. Each group made differential use of orate and literate features according to the expectations their culture had prepared them to have of the task at hand. So, given the same situation and the same task, people from different cultures will interpret the situation and the demands of the task differently, and thus behave in different ways.

Summary

The ways in which language means, both as sign and as action, differ according to the medium used. The spoken medium bears the marks of more or less orality, more or less literacy, as measured against the characteristic features of conversational-spoken vs. essayist-written language.

Through the social organization of talk, culture is constructed across day-to-day dialogues, through the choice of frames and footing that speakers adopt vis-à-vis their own and others’ discourse, and through the way they collaborate in the necessary facework within a variety of discourse types.

Culture puts its imprint on the conversational and narrative styles of the members of a social group.

Print and power

Institutional power has traditionally ensured cultural continuity by providing a safeguard against the unbounded interpretation of text. In medieval times, monks, scribes, and commentators served as the gate-keepers and interpreters of tradition against cultural change. With the advent of print culture, the need to hand copy texts disappeared, and so did the caste of scribes. At the same time ecclesiastical authority itself was on the wane. The combination of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press around 1440 and the translation of the Bible into vernacular German by Martin Luther in 1552, made the sacred truth accessible to all, and not only to the Church-educated elite. It opened the door to the unlimited and uncontrolled proliferation of meanings. Soon, the Church monopoly on meaning was replaced by the interpretive authority and censorship of secular powers, i.e. academy, the press and the political institutions. Whereas oral culture has been seen as exerting a “prophylactic”, or invisible, censorship on its members through the conservative pressure of the social group; textual culture because it is more able to express the particular meanings of individual writers, has usually been censored by external powers, like The Church or the State. Thus, while the written medium has been viewed as potentially more subversive than the spoken medium, in reality it has also been constrained by institutions like the academy, the law, the publishing industry, that have always been in control of new technologies.

The academic monopoly over the meaning of written texts has manifested itself up to recently by its definition of literacy as merely the ability to read and write. The importance given to the formal linguistic aspects of texts, to the etymology of words and literal meanings, to correct grammar and accurate spelling, ensured attention to, and compliance with, the letter of texts, but not necessarily with their spirit. Traditional academic practice, that emphasized form over meaning and had students interpret texts as if they were autonomous units, independent of reader’s response, implicitly imposed its own context of interpretation on all, claiming that its norms of interpretation were universal and accessible to anybody’s intuition.

Text and discourse

Text is the product of language use held together by cohesive devices. The notion of text views a stretch of written language as the product of an identifiable authorial intention, and its relation to its context of culture as fixed and table. Text meaning is seen as identical with the semantic signs it is composed of: text explication is used to retrieve the author’s intended meaning, text deconstruction explores the associations evoked by the text. We do not take into consideration either what happens in the minds of the readers nor the social context of reception.

Discourse is the process of language use, whether it be spoken, written or printed, that includes writers, texts, and readers within a sociocultural context of meaning production and reception.

Coherence plays a particularly important role with poetic texts that are meant to engage the reader’s emotions and sensibility, but it can also be found in other written texts. Take, for example, the label found on aspirin bottles.

WARNING: Keep this and all medication out of the reach of childen. As with any drug, if you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health professional before using this product. In the case of accidental overdosage, contact a physician or poison control centre immediately.

This text is coherent, it makes sense for the reader who knows from prior personal or vicarious experiences that drugs are bad both for children and for pregnant women,who understands the difference between a health professional and a physician, and who understands why you would go to the former if you are pregnant and to the latter if you had taken too much aspirin. In addition to prior experience, the reader makes sense of this text by near electrical wires, places off limits and dangerous substances. However, prior experience and prior texts are not sufficient to render this text coherent. Why is it entitled WARNING where the danger is not explicitly stated? Why should one go and seek help only in case of “accidental” overdose? Why does the text say “overdosage” instead of “overdose”? In order to make the text coherent, we have to draw on the two other contextual factors mentioned above: the text’s purpose, and its conditions of production.

The pharmaceutical company that issued this warning wants to avoid lawsuits, but it also wants to avoid spreading panic among aspirin users, who might thereby refrain from buying a product. Thus it does not like to highlight the word “dangerous” on its bottle, nor does it want to use the word ‘overdose” because of its too close association with the drug traffic scene. It wants to create the image of a reader as an intelligent mainstream person who could not possibly take an overdose of aspirin, unless by accident. The commercial and legal interests, i.e. the corporate culture, of the company have to be drawn into the interpretation of this text, in order to make it into coherent discourse.

One of the greatest sources of difficulty for foreign readers is less the internal cohesion of the text than the cultural coherence of the discourse. For example, a sentence like “ Although he was over 20 years old, he still lived at home” written for an American readership, draws on the readers’ cultural knowledge concerning young men’s independence from their families, but might not be self-evident for readers from a culture where young men continue to live at home well into their twenties. Conversely, a sentence like “I made spaghetti for dinner, because potatoes are so expensive nowadays”, written for a German reader, draws on the cultural fact that many Germans always have potatoes with their meals; it may sound odd to a reader with other cultural habits. The ability of the reader to interpret such logical connections shows how much coherence is dependent on the context of the literacy event itself.

 

Genre

Genre is a socially-sanctioned type of communicative event, either spoken (interview, sermon, joke, lecture) or printed (novel, press report, political manifesto). It is viewed as a universal type, fixed by literary and other conventions. But in sociocultural perspective genre is always dependent on being perceived within a specific context of situation or culture.

The concept of genre is related to text type and language choice.

There are striking differences between French and Anglo-Saxon genre “research paper”. Anglo-Saxon scientists have to legitimize their research by displaying in the first paragraph all extant research on the same topic and showing how their own fills a neglected gap. By contrast, French scientific articles draw their legitimation from the status and affiliation of the researcher, and their work in the field; French scientists find the initial review of the literature rather futile. Unlike their French counterparts, Anglo-Saxon scientists have to make explicit their adherence to a recognizable school, disciplinary tradition, or theoretical orientation; French scientists prefer their research to stand on its own merits. Whereas American research articles end with the obligatory discussion of “the limitations of the study”, French articles do not such thing; instead, they are obligated to raise larger questions, and point to directions for further areas of study. These two different styles within two scientific communities that otherwise share the same purpose may create difficulties.

The concept of text type establishes constraints on what one is expected to write about, in what form, for what audience. Religious leaders in some cultures, like Shi’a Islam, make a difference between texts that tell the truth, e.g., the sacred text of Qur’an, and those that lie, such as poetry. Narrative irony, as found in the Western novel, is not a familiar text feature in a culture that expects narrative truths to be identical to real-life truth. Those who use novelistic irony and fiction to criticize Islamic practices, like Salman Rushdie did, are read at face-value and condemned by those who have authority to be the textual gate-keeper of their culture.

 

Summary

The advent of writing and the invention of printing have radically changed the relation and culture. The maintenance of historical tradition, the control of collective memory, the authority to interpret events have all been enhanced by the written medium. Thus textual culture has become the dominant culture of research and scholarship.

There are two ways of looking at written language: as a fixed and stable product (text); as interactive highly inferential process between a text and its readers (discourse).

 

 

Cultural identity

It is widely believed that there is a natural connection between the language spoken by members of social group and that group’s identity. By their accent, their vocabulary, their discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and are identified as members of this or that speech and discourse community. From this membership, they draw personal strength and pride, as well as a sense of social importance and historical continuity from using the same language as the group they belong to.

But how to define which group one belongs to? In isolated, homogeneous communities one may still define group membership according to common cultural practices and daily face-to-face interactions. But in modern, historically complex, open societies it is much more difficult to define the boundaries of any particular social group and the linguistic and cultural identities of its members.

Take ethnicity for example. In 1982 survey conducted among the highly mixed population of Belize (former British Honduras) it was found out that different people ascribed themselves to different ethnicities as either Spanish, Creole, Maya or Belizean, according to which ethnic criterion they focused on – physical features (hair and skin), general appearance, genetic descent, provenance, or nationality. Rarely was language used as an ethnically defining criterion. Interestingly, it was only under the threat of a Guatemalan takeover as soon as British rule would cease, that the sense of a Belizean national identity slowly started emerging from among the multiple ethnic ascriptions that people still give themselves to this day.

Group identity based on race would seem easier to define, and yet there are almost as many genetic differences, say, between members of the same White, or Black race as there are between the classically described human races, not to speak of the difficulty in some cases of ascertaining with 100% exactitude a person’s racial lineage. For example, in 1983 the South African government changed the racial classification of 690 people: 2/3 of these, who had been Coloreds, became Whites, 71 who had been Blacks became Coloreds, and 11 Whites were redistributed among other racial groups. And, of course, there is no necessary correlation between a given racial characteristic and the use of a given language or variety of language.

Regional identity is equally contestable. As reported in the London Times of February 1984, when a Soviet book, Populations of the World, claimed that the population of France consisted of French, Alsatians, Flemings, Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Jews, Armenians, Gypsies and others, George Marchais, the French Communist leader, violently disagreed that for them every man and woman of French nationality is French, France is not a multinational state, it is one nation, the product of a long history.

One would think that national identity is a clear cut either/or affair (either you are or you are not a citizen), but it is one thing to have a Turkish passport, another thing to ascribe yourself to a Turkish national identity if you were born, raised and educated in Germany, a native speaker of German, and happen to have Turkish parents.

Despite the entrenched belief in the one language=one culture equation, individuals assume several collective identities that are likely not only to change over time in dialogue with others, but are liable to be in conflict with one another. For example, an immigrant’s sense of self, that was linked in his country of origin to his social class, his political views, or his economic status, becomes, in the new country, overwhelmingly linked to his national citizenship or his religion, for this is the identity that is imposed on him by others, who see in him now, for example, only a Turk or a Muslim. His own sense of self, or cultural identity, changes accordingly. Out of nostalgia for the “old country”, he may tend to become more Turkish than the Turks and entertain what Benedict Anderson has called “long distance nationalism”. The Turkish he speaks may become with the passing of years somewhat different from the Turkish spoken today in the streets of Ankara; the community he used to belong to is now more an “imagined community” than the actual present-day Turkey.

 

Cultural stereotypes

The problem lies in equating the racial, ethnic, national identity imposed on an individual by the state’s bureaucratic system, and that individual’s self-ascription. Group identity is not a natural fact, but a cultural perception. What we perceive about a person’s culture and language is what we have been conditioned by our own culture to see, and the stereotypical models already built around our own. Group identity is a question of focusing and diffusion of ethnic, racial, national concepts or stereotypes. Focusing is an anthropological concept referring to the process by which stereotypes are formed by selectively focusing on certain classificatory concepts prevalent within a certain discourse community. Diffusion is an anthropological concept that refers to the process by which stereotypes are formed by extending the characteristic of one person or group of persons to all, e.g., all Americans are individualists, all Chinese are collectivists.

E.g. A man in Singapore claimed that he would never have any difficulty in telling the difference between an Indian and a Chinese. But how he would instantly know that a dark-skinned non-Malay person was an Indian (and not Pakistani), and that the light-skinned non-European was Chinese (not Korean), unless he differentiated the two according to the official Singaporian ethnic categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others? In another context with different racial classifications he might have interpreted differently the visual clues presented to him by people in the street. His interpretation was focused by the classificatory concepts prevalent in his society. In turn this focus may prompt him, by a phenomenon of diffusion, to identify all other Chinese along the same ethnic categories, according to the stereotype “All Chinese look alike to me”.

Societies impose racial and ethnic categories only on certain groups: Whites do not usually identify themselves by the color of their skin, but by their provenance or nationality. They would find it ludicrous to draw their sense of cultural identity from their membership in the White race. Two Danish women in the US were startled when a young African-American boy asked them about their culture. Seeing how perplexed they were he explained that he was Black. They answered that they spoke Danish and came from Denmark. The boy did not use language as a criterion of group identity, but the Danes did.