Carrying a Baby in the Back: Teaching with an Awareness of the Cultural Construction of Language

Fariba Chamani (2016)

By Randal Holme

Different views of cultureCommunicative view Culture as a source of ‘carrier content’

for the language points

Classical-curriculum view Culture as a means of enhancing the intellectual value of language.

Instrumental view or culture-free-language view

Language as an instrument for cultural transmission promoting values of its host-culture

Deconstructionist view Language as a social/cultural construction

Competence view Culture as essential to the full grasp of meaning

Deconstructionist & Competence views

These views assume that language and culture are interrelated & they shape each other in accordance with Whorf’s (1956) relativistic views (different languages view the world differently).

This assumption was once questionable but it is now supported by the cognitivist interest in how the conceptual structures that underlie abstract and, hence, grammatical meaning may be culturally constructed.

Purpose of this studyIt provides evidence from cognitive

linguistics to show how culture affects the nature of language.

Then, it shows how the nature of this effect can alter classroom approaches to the language teaching.

Effect of culture on language

Whorf (1956) language affects how

a culture conceptualizes reality.

Different languages evolved different ways of seeing.

Chomsky (1965) Universal structures

undelie all languages.

Thus, culturally differences among languages appear trivial compared to their common, underlying features.

Semantic primitives Wierzbicka (1980): semantic primitives are a

small set of innate universal concepts.

But a given semantic primitive can be divided into meanings that may vary from one language to another in response to a cultural effect.

Example: Mateship in Australian language

Semantic primitives The reduction of culturally divided

meanings to their common primitives is based on category construction.

Example: mangoes and strawberries must first be reduced through their common properties to fruit, and fruit reduced to the common property of something.

Semantic primitives Cognitivist views of meaning takes an

opposite direction of reductionist view: The meaning of a mango is not generated

from the concept of something; rather, our idea of something is extracted from the physical experience of phenomena in the world, the individual fruits.

Cultural realization of universals Wierzbicka suggests a balance between the

universal primitives and their cultural realization.

Yet, she does not specify how these cultural differences may cause misunderstandings in order to justify the inclusion of culture into curriculum.

Also she doesn’t provide any theory of producing culturally appropriate forms.

Cognitive linguistics & S. primitives

Language roots not in universal abstraction but in the experience of ourselves as physical beings and through our interaction with world as a physical entity.

Semantic primitives are based on the way in which we schematize our early physical experience of ourselves and the world.

Cognitive linguistics & S. primitives

Physical experience is not common to humanity everywhere, only some attributes of it are.

Even the universal experiences are perceived through the filter of cultures.

So we may conceptualize universal experience through different conceptual metaphors.

Conceptual metaphor: understanding of one idea in terms of another.

Time Time, as a universal concept, is conceptualized

differently in different languages under the effect of culture.

Most people have conceptualized time as the movement of sun into a line, with future as in front and past as behind.

However, in some cultures, people see the future behind and the past ahead.

Conceptual metaphors “A red herring” in English means something

unimportant used to distract people from noticing or thinking about something important.

The idiom, as a hunting metaphor, derives from the practice of using a herring (fish) to distract hunting dogs.

This is an example of metaphor formation under the effect of culture.

A pedagogical example The following episode shows how a failure to grasp

meaning can arise from cultural preconceptions.

In a multicultural class, the author asks his students to close their eyes and to find one of their earliest memories.

One student: ‘I was walking with my mother…I was tired. I wanted to go into my mother’s back.’

A pedagogical example The teacher asks “into or onto”?

The student explains that in his country a mother would carry a child ‘in the back’ (in a sling on the back).

Therefore using ‘go into’ was not so much a misunderstanding of a preposition as a literal attempt to convey a cultural practice.

Conclusions language and culture influence each other within the formulation of

conceptual metaphor and construction of abstract thought as its product.

Language transmits a collection of the schematizations of past users, some of which are universals, it is also adaptable and sensitive to the newer emerging conceptual metaphors.

This relationship between culture and language is important to how teachers perceive language.

Thank You!