Semantics: Behaviorism and Context, Culture and Style

SEMANTICS
BEHAVIORISM AND CONTEXT, CULTURE AND STYLE
by:
ARADILA PRIANDO (1105121142)
BELA YUNITA (1105120682)
DELVIANA ANGGRA MUSTIKAH (1105111571)
ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM

LANGUAGE AND ARTS DEPARTMENT
TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY
RIAU UNIVERSITY
2014
CONTEXT AND REFERENCE

Behaviorism
Malinowski and Firth believed that the description of a language could not be complete
without some reference to the context of situation in which the language operated.
Behaviorism, associated first in linguistics with Bloomfield. He defined the meaning of
linguistics form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the
hearer. This is going much further than either Malinowski or Firth. They made statement of
meaning in term of the situation.
Bloomfield illustrated his views with a now famous account of Jill and jack. Jill is hungry,
sees an apple and with the use of language gets Jack to fetch it for her. If she had been alone ( or
if she had not been human ) she would have first received a stimulus (s) which would have
produced a reaction ( r ) ( the term response is more usual ) she would have made a move to get
the apple. This can be diagrammed:
SR
Since, Jack was with her, the stimulus produced not the reaction R, but a linguistic reaction,
that of speaking to Jack, which may symbolize by r. The sound waves resulting from this in turn
created a stimulus for Jack, a linguistic stimulus (s), which results in his non-linguistic reaction R
of getting an apple.
S
rs
One important point for the theory is that the stimulus and the reaction are physical events,
for Jill it is a matter of light waves striking her eyes, of her muscles contracting and el fluids
being secreted in her stomach. Jacks action is no less physical. Bloomfield accounted for this by
arguing that the speech the practical events depend upon predisposing factors which consist of
the entire life history of the speaker and hearer. These predisposing factor must, however carry a
great deal of the weight of explaining the linguistic facts. For not only may the same apparent
situation produce quite different linguistic responses but also the same linguistic response may
occur in quite different situation. Bloomfield had noted that Im hungry might be uttered not
only by someone who really was hungry but also by a naughty child who did not want to go to
bed.
Now, it may be well be that ultimately all activity is in principle, explainable in term of
physical entities and event, the chemistry, electromagnetism, etc. involved in the cell of human
brain. It seems probable that our experiences are recorded in some way by changes in the state of
the brain. But this is, in the light of present human knowledge, no more than an act of faith, a
simple belief in the physical nature of all human activity. But Bloomfield theory loses its force
when we realize how many of the relevant predisposing factors are unknown and unknowable.
Context, culture and style
Language has deictic, which identify objects, persons and events in terms of their relation
to the speaker in space and time. There are three main types of deictic.
1. The speaker must be able to identify the participants in the discourse himself and the
person or persons to whom he is speaking.
2. English has here and there, this and that to distinguish between the position of the
speaker or closeness to it and other positions or greater distances. The exact spatial
relationship indicated by such words will vary according to the language. In Malagasy,
for instance, the choice of the words ety and aty which may be translated here and
there depends on whether the object in question is visible or not to the speaker.
3. Time relations are indicated in English not only by general adverbs such as now and then
but also by more specific ones such as yesterday and tomorrow.
Deictics cannot be ignored in the study of meaning, but they raise problems for any kind of
analysis that treats propositions or statements (categorical assertions) as somehow basic to
semantics.
Another very important aspect of context is that provided by social relations. It is often not
enough for the speaker to be able to identify the person to whom he is speaking, also indicate
quite clearly the social relations between himself and this person. In many European languages
particularly, we can distinguish between a polite and a familiar second person pronoun for
addressing a single person. The polite form is either what is grammatically or historically the
second person plural form or a third person form. Thud French, Greek and Russian use the plural
forms, tu/vous, esi/esis, ty/vy (while English has lost the singular form thou altogether). Italian
and Spanish use third person forms and thus still retain the singular/plural distinction tu/Lei
and voi/Lor, tu/ustd, and vos/ustdes.
The choices between the familiar and the polite form, or what, following the French forms
are called the T and V forms seem to be determined by two factors, which have been termed
Power and Solidarity (Brown & Gilman, 1960). Power involves the asymmetric relations, older
than, parent of, employer of, richer than, stronger than, and nobler than. While
solidarity involves such symmetric relations as attended the same school, have the same
parents, practise the same proffesion.
This costum has now almost wholly disappeared except among older older academics; the
reason is very probably that the use of surname alone was an employer-employee power device
which was felt to be objectionable by the increasing numbers of people with working-class
origins who entered the profession. The solidarity device today is the use of first names, though
this too has some power function, as between teacher (or parent) and child.
There are other characteristics of the context that affect the choice of language. Apart from
the style of individual (which they call singularity), Crystal and Davy suggested three main
features of style: Province, Status and Morality. Province is concerned with occupation and
professional activity the language of law, science, advertising, etc. Status deals (again) with
social relations, but especially in terms of the formality of language and the use of polite or
colloquial language or of slang. Joos (1962) suggested there were five degrees of formality:
frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate. Modality is intended to relate to the
choice between poetry and prose, essay and short story, the language of memoranda, telegrams,
jokes, etc.
A competent speaker of a language must have command of all these different style. But he
will almost certainly have some command also of different kinds of his language that are
collectively known as dialect. The term dialect has until recently been used only to refer to
different forms of the language used in different geographical areas, but it has been realized that
there are similar differences between the language of social classes within the same
geographical area and that it is not at all easy to draw a clear distinction between these two
phenomena. Most speakers have some command of several dialects or socially distinct version of
their language. They can, moreover, switch from one to other in the course of conversation. A
number of languages, e.g. especially Arabic, Modern Greek, Haitian Creole, and Swiss German
have the phenomenon Diglossia. Diglossia in which there are two quite distinct dialects of the
language whose choice depends upon what can only be described generally as the formality of
the situation.
The extreme case is that of a bilingual society where two distinct languages are in use
within a single conversation the speakers may switch from one to the other, example from
English to Spanish. This practice of changing from one dialect or language to another is called
Code Switching.
The fact that a single speaker makes use of so many varieties of language raises a serious
theoretical problem. In the case of diglossia, although it may seem easy enough to determine that
there are two varieties of the language, the distinction between the two is not always completely
clear and speakers often seem to use language that is, in varying degrees, somewhere between
the two. Issues of code-switching, diglossia, dialect, sociolinguistics and stylistics all fall into the
area of semantics.

Semantics: Behaviorism and Context, Culture and Style

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Semantics: Behaviorism and Context, Culture and Style

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Semantics: Behaviorism and Context, Culture and Style

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SEMANTICS

BEHAVIORISM AND CONTEXT, CULTURE AND STYLE

ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM

CONTEXT AND REFERENCE

You might also like