Does Language Influence Culture?

[Tracy Duvall]

My comment was directed less at the programmatic statements that researchers have made and more at the actual production of research into the ways that people continuously develop awareness of themselves and their surroundings and communicate within themselves and with others, consciously or not. The development of new technologies seems really promising in this sense, in providing the opportunity to go beyond the a priori privileging of language compared to and its over-extraction from: non-linguistic sensory perception (including via social interactions), hormonal changes, non-linguistic motions, non-linguistic thought, etc. Of course, I'm aware of these new opportunities partly because of others' research, from diverse fields.

Certainly I like an approach that sees language and culture, however defined, as not separable. But don't metaphors such as "feedback loop," presumably between language and culture (or cognition, or thought), encourage mechanistic views in which language might always coexist with culture but in which it somehow separately gives and receives inputs with "it"?

Tracy


----- Original Message -----
From: "MJ Hardman" <hardman at UFL.EDU>
To: LINGANTH at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 7:07:10 AM GMT +07:00 Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta
Subject: Re: Does Language Influence Culture?

Of course it's a feedback loop, always, as a lot of us having been saying,
myself for 50 years.  The courses that treat this are called 'language and
culture' and the first lecture is that the two are NOT separable. MJ

On 7/28/10 10:34 AM, "Gaudio, Rudolf" <Rudolf.Gaudio at PURCHASE.EDU> wrote:

> * Ultimately, the extraction of language from culture or thought seems too
> mechanical. Researchers in recent years have been learning increasingly how
> the separation between supposedly genetic and non-genetic aspects of
> development breaks down upon close examination. I suspect that an analogous
> approach would provide better explanations for many of the phenomena discussed
> in this article.