The relationship between language and culture

The relationship between language and culture is that language belongs to the category of culture, the scope of language is relatively small, the scope of culture is relatively large, and culture is divided into many aspects, and language is only one of them.

Explain in detail:

One: Language and culture are interdependent and influence each other. Language is an important carrier of culture; Culture has a restrictive effect on language. This paper analyzes the internal system of language from the form and structure of language, and discusses the social function and other external factors of language.

Language plays a very important role in all human activities and is an indispensable part of human social life. However, human language phenomenon is so mysterious that human beings have not fully understood it so far. Since ancient times, linguists have tried to explore language from many aspects and formed many linguistic schools. To sum up, modern linguistics mainly comes from two traditions: philology tradition and anthropology tradition. The tradition of philology begins with comparative linguistics and historical linguistics, and analyzes and compares languages according to the study of literary works and written documents. /kloc-The work of linguists in the 20th century laid the foundation for the independent study of modern linguistics, which later developed into Broomfield's structuralism and Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. The successor of this tradition emphasizes the natural attributes of language, regards language as a closed and independent system, and regards linguistics as an independent marginal science spanning humanities and natural sciences. Anthropological tradition refers to the use of anthropological methods to study the language of social groups without writing system and writing tradition. Since Boaz and Sapir in the United States in the early 20th century, human linguists have always emphasized the social attributes of language, believing that language is inseparable from its social environment. Therefore, linguistics must be regarded as a social science and studied in the social and cultural environment. The research tradition of anthropolinguistics has led to the emergence and rise of cultural linguistics. Linguists examine the process of language communication from the perspective of culture, and find that people not only involve the language system in the process of language communication, but also the cultural system closely related to the language system and on which they live.

There are two terms in the study of language and culture: "language and culture" and "language in culture". In order to define the relationship between language and other cultural phenomena, some linguists divide culture into "big culture" and "small culture" (Bright, 1976). Among them, the relationship between language and big culture is subordinate, and the relationship between language and small culture is parallel.

Four: Language is a special part of culture. If culture is regarded as an all-encompassing concept, then language belongs to the whole culture of human beings, that is, the category of grand culture. But it has a special position in the whole culture, corresponding to the relationship with other components in the whole culture (that is, small culture). Therefore, we can think that language is a social phenomenon, a tool for interpersonal communication and a medium for integrating people and culture. It is formed with the formation of human beings, and also develops and changes with the development of human society.

Five: From the micro-cultural point of view, language and culture happen at the same time. Without language, there is no culture. Language is the premise of the formation and development of culture, and the development of culture also promotes the rich development of language. With language, human beings have culture. Language is an important symbol that distinguishes human beings from animals. From a biological point of view, primitive people and animals have many similarities, but people produced language, while animals did not. Primitive people have religion, belief, morality, customs and other things that belong to the cultural category, but animals don't. Human beings created culture with language, which in turn influenced human beings and made them make greater progress. The cultural heritage accumulated by human society since ancient times has left a deep imprint on language. Human language is the language of human society and culture, and it has many close ties with human society and culture.

Six: In the cultural structure, the basic unit of semantics is "sememe". Sememe is the basic unit of lexical position, which expresses semantics through cultural structure. The relationship between morphemes and sememes in language is basically stable. This stable relationship reflects the close relationship between language and culture, and at the same time makes language the key to understanding culture. However, there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and sememes. Even in the same language, different cultural behaviors of people in different regions or social circles will affect the corresponding relationship between morphemes and sememes.

The language structure of a language is a complete phonetic symbol system and character symbol system, which is the fundamental difference between one language and another. Without understanding the language structure of a language, it is impossible to recognize the pronunciation or written symbols of the language and obtain the semantics from them. People who don't master the structure of French language will find it difficult to recognize the meanings expressed by different combinations of French letters. Similarly, people who don't know Russian will regard Russian as an abstract combination of letters and have no idea what it means.