Culture and Spoken Discourse
All cultural and
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All cultural and all linguistic behaviors are patterned, manifesting these patterns through distinctions made in a medium (Hoijer, 1954). S.I. Hayakawa (1972) has commented that verbal discourse and communication are instrumental in character and that the informative connotations of words and phrases are their socially agreed-upon "impersonal meanings." Language is, in the view of Hayakawa (1972), positioned firmly within the context of culture and is representative of that culture, its beliefs and value systems, its norms, and forms of expression. Informative uses of language are intimately fused with older and deeper functions of language and often represent a force for social cohesion. This report will consider the effects of culture on spoken discourse, arguing, as does Hayakawa (1978), that what we call social conversation or discourse is largely presymbolic in character. Speech is embedded in the world of the speaker. Leonard R. Palmer (1972) has argued that symbols which originate in culture form the rungs of a ladder by which thought gradually ascends from the concrete impression to the most abstract juggling with pure ideas. Language seems to provide the grooves of thought in much the same way that cultural patterns constitute the molds or models for more general modes of behavior. The importance of language has been stressed by two American scholars, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who proposed what has become know
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munity.
A somewhat different position is advanced by Noam Chomsky (1965) who maintains that linguistic theory is associated primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech-community who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions (e.g., memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors). Chomsky (1965) may well oversimplify grammatical competence and tends to ignore the vast range of personal and social factors which create cultural variations in spoken discourse.
Chomsky (1965) does recognize that all languages contain a syntactic component with a base comprised of a system of rules that generate a highly restricted and perhaps even finite set of basic strings, each with an associated structural description called a base Phrase-maker. He recognizes a "deep structure" embedded within any given language but also sees universal categories of such structures at work in virtually all languages.
Joseph H. Greenberg (1971) also believes that underlying the endless idiosyncracies of the world's languages are uniformities of universal scope. Language universals in this view, are summary statements about characteristics or tende
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Noam Chomsky, Teamsterville Nacirema, Interestingly Hoijer's, Lee Whorf, Roger Fowler, Joseph Greenberg, Ferguson Heath, Fearch Kasper, Standard English, SI Hayakawa, spoken discourse, language culture, fowler 1974, communication strategies, philipsen 1992, verbal discourse, culture spoken, culture spoken discourse, text useful, useful identifying, chomsky 1965, american standard english, ferguson heath 1981, verbal discourse communication, spoken discourse language,
Approximate Word count = 2655
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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