Dinh Ngoc Thuy
Language as a dependent system under the influence of culture, gender
and social status.
After Saussure affirmed language as an autonomous
system comprising morphology, orthography, grammar and vocabulary,
anthropologist Malinnowski (1923), philosopher Voloshinov (1929), linguist
Sapir (1929), and Halliday (1978, 1991) proposed the influence of culture on
language. In sociolinguistic view, Wardhaugh (1986) and Lakoff (1990) with
their insightful analysis on human’s speech ascertained that social factors
such as gender and status affect language use. This paper examines how culture
influences writing and ideologies embedded in a text, especially how people of
different cultures construct their ideas though they write in the same language
and how different the choice of language use is under the impact of gender and
hierarchical society. Analysis on texts in English textbooks in Vietnamese high
schools, some Vietnamese as well as English short stories and Michelle Obama’s
speech will be made to illustrate the points.
Referneces
Halliday,
M.A.K. (1978). Language as social
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30 March – 1 April 1991 (pp. 1-26). Launceston:
Lakoff, R.
(1990). Talking Power: The Politics of
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(1923). The problem of meaning in primitive languages – Supplement 1. In C.K.
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V.N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy
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(1986). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.
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