Language and Culture: Linguistic Categories and Perception
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Language and Culture: Chapter 20
Course Information
- Chapter: 20 - Language and Culture
- Subject: Language and Written Expression IV
- Student: Gabriela Rocio Soto Valic
Defining Culture
Culture refers to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and people that we learn as members of social groups. We acquire these initially without conscious awareness. The particular language we learn through the process of cultural transmission provides a ready-made system for categorizing the world and our experiences.
Categories and External Reality
There is a fixed relationship between the set of words we learn and how external reality is organized. A category is a group with certain features in common, represented by vocabulary used to refer to concepts shared within a social world.
Kinship and Time Concepts
- Kinship Terms: Lexical words used to refer to members of the same family. Note that not all languages categorize family members in the same way.
- Time Concepts: Abstract lexical words inherited as a conceptual system that operates with amounts of time as common categories.
- Linguistic Relativity: The study of how we perceive the world using categories provided by our language.
- Linguistic Determinism: The theory that language determines thought.
Cognitive Categories
Cognitive categorization is a method of analyzing how people think about other cultures. It examines language structure for clues rather than causes. Grammatical markers indicate the type or class of nouns, often used in English to denote a “unit of” specific types of things.
Social Categories
These categories of social organization define how we are connected or related to others. This includes the use of pronouns or specific vocabulary to indicate social closeness or distance.
Gender in Language
- Biological Distinction: The distinction between male and female.
- Grammatical Gender: A system used to classify nouns in languages such as Spanish.
- Social Gender: The distinction made when using words like “man” and “woman” to classify individuals based on social roles.
Gendered Language Aspects
- Gendered Words: Vocabulary used exclusively by men or women.
- Gendered Speech: Differences in pitch range (the effect of vibration in the vocal folds) between men and women.
- Gendered Interaction: The difference between same-gender and cross-gender communication.