同学们，本栏目是对你们学过的知识和生活中常见问题的归纳。其中，有一些共性问题，也许你会需要哦！

让我来帮你解决常见问题！

Question1: What is Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Explain it in your own language?

Answer:

The view on the interdependence of language, culture and thought has been succinctly expressed by what is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The hypothesis is interpreted in two ways. One is known as determinism, which means that language determines our thinking, and consequently, different languages may probably lead to unique ways of understanding the world. This strong version has been rejected as it runs counter to the fact that peoples of different cultural backgrounds can understand each other.

The other interpretation is termed relativism, which has drawn more attention in the late 1990s. This view holds that similarity between languages is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the experienced world will be. Culture affects the way we think through language. Culture influences language by way of symbols and rules as well as our perceptions of the universe. Equally important is the fact that meaning in many cases may vary from culture to culture.

Question2: what is the ethnography of communication?

Answer:

Hymes takes all the factors that are involved in communication into account. He uses the acronym SPEAKING to represent all the relevant factors.

1) The S stands for the setting and scene of a speech event. Setting refers to the time and place, the concrete physical circumstance in which a speech event takes place. Scene refers to the abstract psychological state or the cultural definition of the occasion.

2) The P represents participants, namely addresser-addressee, speaker-hearer. The relation between the participants determines to a great extent what it is talked about and how it is said.

3) The E stands for the ends of speech events that the participants seek to achieve. The interviewer tries to seek information or opinion from the interviewee, who tries to make his point clear and known by others.

4) The A refers to act sequence, i.e. the actual form and content of what is said.

5) The K means key, namely the tone, intonation, or manner with which a message is conveyed by the speaker: serious, precise, light-hearted, mocking, sarcastic, etc.

6) The I stands for instrumentalities, that is the choice of channel of communication.

7) The N represents norms of interaction and interpretation. They are socio-cultural specific behaviors of speaking, such as when to speak, when to remain silent, loudness, etc.

8) The last initial G stands for genre, types of discourse. Poems, sermons, lectures, speeches, conversations, etc. are all demarcated in structure and style.

Question3: Are linguistic meanings universal?

Answer:

(1) Word meaning, particularly the meaning of culturally loaded words, may vary in certain aspects from culture to culture. The interrelationship between language and culture results in the fact that one-to-one equivalence can rarely be established between words in two languages.

(2) A full understanding of the several kinds of meanings that are coded in the grammar and vocabulary of a language comes only with a full understanding of the culture, in which it operates.

(3) Words of different languages that denote the same category may have different prototypes. It is natural that speakers of different languages may have different conceptions of the same category.

(4) A word can elicit many meanings.

(5) If we include culture as a variable in the process of abstracting meaning, the problems become all the more acute, for culture teaches us both the symbol and what the symbol represents.

(6) There are even differences between British and American usage in word meanings. Culture influences the way people use language. Meaning is culturally determined.

(7) If we look at corresponding lexical sets, we can understand both the universal aspects and cultural aspect of linguistic meanings. Color terms in different languages are very illustrative examples.