Behaviorism Context, Culture, and Style

BehaviorismContext, Culture, and StyleBy: Aradila PriandoBela YunitaDelviana Anggra Mustikah

BehaviorismMalinowski and Firth believed that the description of a language could not be complete without some reference to the context of situation in which the language operated.

Bloomfield defined the meaning of linguistics form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer. Bloomfield illustrated his views with a now famous account of Jill and jack. Jill is hungry, sees an apple and with the use of language gets Jack to fetch it for her. If she had been alone ( or if she had not been human ) she would have first received a stimulus (s) which would have produced a reaction ( r ) ( the term response is more usual ) she would have made a move to get the apple. This can be diagrammed:S R

Since, Jack was with her, the stimulus produced not the reaction R, but a linguistic reaction, that of speaking to Jack, which may symbolize by r. The sound waves resulting from this in turn created a stimulus for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in his non-linguistic reaction R of getting an apple.

S rs ROne important point for the theory is that the stimulus and the reaction are physical events, for Jill it is a matter of light waves striking her eyes, of her muscles contracting and el fluids being secreted in her stomach. Jacks action is no less physical.

Bloomfield accounted for this by arguing that the speech the practical events depend upon predisposing factors which consist of the entire life history of the speaker and hearer.For not only may the same apparent situation produce quite different linguistic responses but also the same linguistic response may occur in quite different situation.

Im hungry might be uttered not only by someone who really was hungry but also by a naughty child who did not want to go to bed.Now, it may be well be that ultimately all activity is in principle, explainable in term of physical entities and event, the chemistry, electromagnetism, etc involved in the cell of human brain. It seems probable that our experiences are recorded in some way by changes in the state of the brain. But this is, in the light of present human knowledge, no more than an act of faith, a simple belief in the physical nature of all human activity. But Bloomfield theory loses its force when we realize how many of the relevant predisposing factors are unknown and unknowable.

Context, culture and styleLanguage has deictic, which identify objects, persons and events in terms of their relation to the speaker in space and time. There are three main types of deictic.

1. The speaker must be able to identify the participants in the discourse himself and the person or persons to whom he is speaking.

2. English has here and there, this and that to distinguish between the position of the speaker or closeness to it and other positions or greater distances. The exact spatial relationship indicated by such words will vary according to the language. In Malagasy, for instance, the choice of the words ety and aty which may be translated here and there depends on whether the object in question is visible or not to the speaker.3. Time relations are indicated in English not only by general adverbs such as now and then but also by more specific ones such as yesterday and tomorrowDeictics cannot be ignored in the study of meaning, but they raise problems for any kind of analysis that treats propositions or statements (categorical assertions) as somehow basic to semantics.

Another very important aspect of context is that provided by social relations. It is often not enough for the speaker to be able to identify the person to whom he is speaking, also indicate quite clearly the social relations between himself and this person.In many European languages particularly, we can distinguish between a polite and a familiar second person pronoun for addressing a single person. The polite form is either what is grammatically or historically the second person plural form or a third person form.French, Greek and Russian use the plural forms, tu/vous, esi/esis, ty/vy (while English has lost the singular form thou altogether).Italian and Spanish use third person forms and thus still retain the singular/plural distinction tu/Lei and voi/Lor, tu/ustd, and vos/ustdes.

10The choices between the familiar and the polite form, or what, following the French forms are called the T and V forms seem to be determined by two factors, which have been termed Power and Solidarity (Brown and Gilman 1960).

Power involves the asymmetric relations, older than, parent of, employer of, richer than, stronger than, and nobler than.Solidarity involves such symmetric relations as attended the same school, have the same parents, practice the same profession.This custom has now almost wholly disappeared except among older academics.

The solidarity device today is the use of first names, though this too has some power function, as between teacher (or parent) and child.

There are other characteristics of the context that affect the choice of language. Apart from the style of individual (which they call singularity), Crystal and Davy suggested three main features of style: Province, Status and Morality.Province is concerned with occupation and professional activity the language of law, science, advertising, etc.Status deals (again) with social relations, but especially in terms of the formality of language and the use of polite or colloquial language or of slang.Modality is intended to relate to the choice between poetry and prose, essay and short story, the language of memoranda, telegrams, jokes, etc.

Joos (1962) suggested there were five degrees of formality: frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate.A competent speaker of a language must have command of all these different style.

But he will almost certainly have some command also of different kinds of his language that are collectively known as dialect.

The term dialect has until recently been used only to refer to different forms of the language used in different geographical areas, but it has been realized that there are similar differences between the language of social classes within the same geographical area and that it is not at all easy to draw a clear distinction between these two phenomena.Most speakers have some command of several dialects or socially distinct version of their language. They can, moreover, switch from one to other in the course of conversation.

Arabic, Modern Greek, Haitian Creole, and Swiss German have the phenomenon Diglossia.

There are two quite distinct dialects of the language whose choice depends upon what can only be described generally as the formality of the situation >>> Diglossia.A bilingual society where two distinct languages are in use within a single conversation the speakers may switch from one to the other, example from English to Spanish. This practice is called Code Switching.

The fact that a single speaker makes use of so many varieties of language raises a serious theoretical problem.

In the case of diglossia, although it may seem easy enough to determine that there are two varieties of the language, the distinction between the two is not always completely clear and speakers often seem to use language that is, in varying degrees, somewhere between the two.

Issues of code-switching, diglossia, dialect, sociolinguistics and stylistics all fall into the area of semantics.Thank you 17