backgrounds, his sex and age.
6.    Pidgin                F. The other approach is to look at society from the point of view of   
                          an individual member within it.
7.    creole                 G. Social-class dialect, or sociolect, refers to the linguistic variety
                          characteristic of a particular social class.
8.    micro-sociolinguistics    H Two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the
                          community, with each having a definite role to play.
9.    regional dialect          We can look at society as a whole and consider how language functions
                         in it and how it reflects the social differentiations.
II. Explain each of the following terms in no more than 50 words:
1. field of discourse        2. tenor of discourse        3. mode of discourse   
4. scales of formality        5. standard dialect         6. register
III. Develop each of the following topics into a 200-word essay:
1.    Varieties of language
2.    Hymes’ communicative competence
3.    Halliday’s Register theory

IX. Language and Culture 语言与文化

语言与文化基本知识

1.    Introduction 引言
Language and culture evolved together and have been mutually dependent through their history.
Much of the recent work has revealed that language is related to cognition, and cognition in turn is related to the cultural setting.
2.    What is culture? 什么是文化？
Culture means the total way of life of a people. This simple definition implies that culture refers to the patterns of customs, traditions, social habits, values, beliefs and language of a society.
As culture is so inclusive, it permeates virtually every aspect of human life and it conditions and determines all of man’s behaviour, including linguistic behaviour.
In broad terms there are two types of culture: material and spiritual. Material culture is concrete, substantial and observable. In contrast with material culture, only a small part of spiritual culture, the products of mind, is tangible, and most spiritual culture is indiscernible, that is implicit, hidden and abstract, including ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space.
The abstract areas of culture not only present problems to foreign language learners, but may constitute potential trouble spots in inter-cultural communication.
3.    Language and Meaning 文化与意义
When we learn a new word we tend to look for meaning in the word itself. It is more accurate to say that people have meaning and that words stir up meanings in people. Various backgrounds and experiences can alter meanings.
4.    Interdependence of Language and Culture 语言与文化相互依赖
We have seen that language meaning is directly related to our experiences. These experiences are unique to each of us not only because of the differences we encountered as individuals while we were growing up and learning to use language, but also because of what our culture gas exposed us to.
Language is the primary means by which a culture transmits its beliefs, values, and norms. It gives people a mean of interacting with other members of the culture.
If we extend the notion that our culture teaches us an internalized response to a word, then various cultures will have specialized responses to the same words. English-speaking culture teaches its people to name what is practical, useful and important. In general sense, the important things in the English-speaking environment take on specific names while the less important things have more general names that must be modified through additional words to become specific.
In short, each culture presents to its members, in conscious and subconscious ways through words, the ideas and concepts that the culture transmits from generation to generation. It is culture that leads to different interpretations and reactions to language.
Language and culture are not independent of mutually exclusive cognitive systems composed of analogous structure and process. Rather, culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. The relation of language to culture is then a relation of part to whole.
5.    The Significance of Cultural Teaching and Learning 文化教与学的意义
For teaching purposes, let us classify culture into “culture” v. “Culture”.
The former refers to culture in an anthropological sense, i.e. the total way of life of a people. It includes everyday culture patterns and is highly recommended in selecting culture content for foreign language teaching. It can be subdivided into:
a)    Active every day patterns which students need to know to function in everyday use of the target language.
b)    Patterns of politics, education, economics, marriage, customs which do not call for active command, but which the learner just needs to know because they facilitate cultural understanding.
The other “Culture” denoting culture in the sociohistorical sense can be defined as the products and contributions of a society. Recent study has revealed the fact: While a little knowledge of the target culture will enable a foreign language learner to observe and analyse his own culture, a little knowledge about the learner’s own culture will also promote foreign language learning.
The differences across cultures can be great barriers to communication.
6.    Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Differences 文化差异的语言例证
Cultural differences in language are manifest in many aspects of human life.
6.1    Greetings 寒暄
It is established that in English there are at least a dozen different greetings, from “Hi” and “Hello” to more specific and longer ones like “How are you getting on?” or “How is everything with you?”. While greetings in Chinese culture form a very limited system, those in English culture a much longer system.
6.2    Thanks and Compliments 致谢和恭维语
It is noted that people in the West tend to verbalise their gratitude and compliments more than Chinese speakers and that they tend to accept thanks and compliments more than we Chinese.
6.3    Terms of Address 称呼语
While in our society, “tongzhi” is used for all people irrespective of sex, position, or marital status, in English speaking communities “Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms” would be appropriate in similar situations.
The extension of kinship terms is another feature of Chinese culture, i.e. uncle, aunt, grandpa, granny for strangers. Native speakers of English would puzzled if they are called such by people outside the immediate family.
6.4    Color Words 颜色语
Some languages have only two color terms: black and white. If a language has three color terms, this third term is invariably red. The other colors most commonly entering linguistic systems are yellow, green, blue and brown, making a total of seven. Even though languages vary somewhat in their color terminology, the variation is apparently not random. It appears to follow a pattern related to the human capacity for perceiving colors.
6.5    Privacy and Taboos 隐私和禁忌语
Although people of different culture have many common areas of privacy or taboos, there are areas where our culture differs from Western culture. It is not appropriate for us to ask questions related to personal information like age, family background, money matters or questions on personal activities when we converse with English-speaking people. To great native English speakers, we should say “How are you?”, “How are you getting on?”, “How is everything?”.
6.6    Rounding off Numbers 数字禁忌
The way a speech community rounds off its numbers is not haphazard, rather, it is explainable as interplay between language and culture.
 Members of a speech community often gives preference to those numbers that their community regards as significant.
That the way speakers round off numbers is often a linguistic convenience is clearly seen by comparing how the Chinese and the Europeans state their age differently.
7.    Cultural Overlap and Diffusion 文化交溶与文化扩散
As result of similarities in natural environment and psychology of human beings, there is greater or lesser degree of cultural overlap between two societies. In many English speaking societies, there are circumstances in which (as is more generally the case in Japanese and Chinese) the superior, but not the inferior, may refer to himself by means of the same kinship-term or tittle with which he is addressed.