New Introduction into CL lecture I презентация

Subject Outline
The lecture will answer the following questions:
Why is culture considered important in the study of Language?
What are the aims of Linguo Cultural Studies?
Why do accents affect perceptions?
Why is culture important in learning language?
Why do values affect language learning?
Why do dialects exist?

Cultural linguistics
Language
Culture
Ethnosemantic
(study of words and their meanings different of ethno)
Linguistics
Conceptualization
(to from an idea about what something is like and how it should work)
Integrating CL with 3 traditions present in Linguistics Anthropology
(the study of human societies, customs and beliefs)
Ethnography
(the study and description of different human societies)

Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization.
Linguistics is a major that is dedicated to the scientific study of language and its applications. Within this major, students can specialize in a range of different areas within two dedicated streams: Linguistics and applied linguistics and English as an international language.

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

Cultural resonance
(an emotional effect produced by something that reminds you of something else)

When we're talking about going from one culture to another culture we often have to change our perspectives and our perceptions to think of things maybe in a little different way than we may have before. But again there could be things in other cultures that might be surprising to us or might be something that we had not considered.
Buon appetito in English there is no satisfactory equivalent to this common phrase in other languages. A waiter may say Enjoy your meal when bringing your food but the phrase is never used between the diners in a restaurant or when eating in someone`s home.

The elements of national picture of the world

Currently, consideration of correlation between language and culture is regarded as one of the central issues in the process of learning foreign languages. This urges teachers to be aware of learners’ cultural background and knowledge. The effective interaction between a foreigner and a native speaker is built on possession of specific cultural information that includes knowledge of traditions, customs and values, symbols and ways of living.
According to Krasner (1999), “linguistic competence alone is not enough for learners of a language to be competent in that language” (p. 80). Therefore, it is impossible to fully master a second language without proper knowledge of its culture. Whenever, English as a second language educator implicitly integrates culture norms in language teaching, s/he enables learners to acquire the language more effectively. Usually, the words in a literary text carry figurative and symbolic cultural associations leading to creation of images.
An image is a form of figurative expression used to produce a certain impression based on subjective description of an object (Galperin, 2010). A problem arises when a learner while reading a text encounters images and comprehends their meanings wrongly due to unawareness of foreign language culture.

As the peoples’ worldview has a linguistic determination based on fixed images of language units, the language reflects mythological, religious views of nation, social-historical, moral, practical and life experience of people. Mostly, national-cultural originality of language is demonstrated in image-bearing means of language (Maslov, 2001).
Image-bearing means include a wide range of tropes (a trope is a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression (Oxford University Press, 2016) and their study from the position of Linguoculturology (Maslov, 2001) is considered as the elements of national language picture of the world.
Overall, images reflect peoples’ cultural-historical experience.

In the process of language teaching, it is critical to take into account that a large amount of cultural phenomena cannot be properly comprehended without knowing the connotative meanings of the colours. Colour, for instance, has a very significant role in many cultures. Specifically, Kazakh people associate the red and white colours with happiness and marriage, but they perceive the black colour as a sign of sadness and death. People get offended if a person, who does not know these associations, presents them, for example, with black scarf, kerchief or dress.
Therefore, knowing about them can be quite helpful in learning about the culture of the foreign country whose language we are teaching/learning. Other research has also proven that colour is one of the key categories of culture that reflects “different national and historical background, the different traditions and habits, the different peoples’ life experience, and aesthetic psychology of culture” (He, 2009, p.160).

As people’s perception of colours is subjective, the definite colour may reflect the peculiarities of a nation. The linguo-cultural knowledge of a colour can assist in revealing the historical, intellectual and social data of a specific nation.
From the ancient times, people have used definite colours to symbolize happiness, life, sadness, or evil and these colours have communicated specific messages to people of different cultures.
The images used with the definite colour may reveal the national vision of people and their attitude towards this colour and associations; in this case, the language aids to deliver the features of national mentality.

To illustrate my point more clearly, here I have chosen the following colours: black and brown. The denotative meaning of these colours is similar in both languages, but the connotative meaning, taking into consideration linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, is different.
In English, the following images are used with the lexeme Black– as black: as a crow, as a crow’s wing, as a raven, as a raven’s wing, as coal, as ink, as jet, as my hat, as your hat, as night, as your boots, as hell, as midnight, as print, as the grave, as sin, as thunder, as a thunder cloud (Kunin, 2005).

Pragmatic differences can result in positive transfer if the speech act is similar in the 1 and 2 languages, it can also result in negative transfer if there are cultural and pragmatic differences between the two languages. For example, when Russians and Moroccans were asked to react to the idea of someone stealing their parking space, the Russians responded with warnings and threats, while the Moroccans either opted not to complain or used much softer strategies. The Russians felt that people should ‘’play fair’’ in a parking lot, while the Moroccans felt that it was not a serious offence and something that they might even do themselves.
Similarly, Eslami @005 tells the story of a female graduate student in the United States feeling offended after being complimented on her appearance by a male office because in her country, ‘compliments on looks and appearances by a male to a female can have intimate connection. These examples show that different cultural and language backgrounds can lead to miscommunication and pragmatic errors for l2 learners.

For instance, Americans have been socialized into responding “Thank you’ to any compliment, as if they were acknowledging a friendly gift: I like your sweater!’ – ‘Oh, thank you!’ The French, who tend to perceive such a compliment as an intrusion in their privacy, would rather downplay the compliment and minimize its value: ‘Oh really? It’s already quite old!’The reactions of both groups are based on the differing values given to compliments in both cultures and on the differing degrees of embarrassment caused by personal comments.

Linguistic relativity by Sapir Whorf hypothesis