9 Language, Thought, and Culture英文.pdf

Language, Thought, and Culturz 231
7 Language, Thought,
and Culture
CLAIRE KRAMSCH
Introductio0
The hypothesis that language both expresses and creates categories of thought
that are shared by members of a social group and that language is, in part,
responsible for the attitudes and beliefs that constitute what we call “culture,”
is a hypothesis that various disciplines have focused on in various ways.
The field of applied linguistics, born in the fifties, at a time when the relation-
ship of language and mind was the primary concern of formal linguistics,
had a natural affinity to the brain sciences as they were developed then.
Applied linguistics missed the heydays of empirical linguistics research that
had led linguists like Boas, Sapir, and Whorf to investigate the relation of
language and culture in pre-industrialized societies. In the rationalist spirit
of the fifties and sixties, and its information processing focus, the young field
of applied linguistics was at first primarily interested in the psycholinguistic
processes at work in language acquisition and testing, and in the cognitive
dimensions of language pedagogy. In the eighties, the ascendancy of sociology
and anthropology created a favorable climate for applied linguists to explore,
in addition, the relation of language and social structure (Halliday, 1978),
the social psychological aspects of language acquisition (., Ellis, 1986)
and the multiple discursive aspects of language in use in a variety of social
contexts (., Gumperz, 1982a & b; Ochs, 1988). It is not before the nineties,
however, that advances in cognitive linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and
the growing importance given to culture in language education brought )
renewed interest in the relation of language, thought, and culture in ap