The document discusses the relationship between language, culture, and cognition through several examples. It describes how the loss of indigenous languages like Ubykh results in the loss of traditional knowledge accumulated over millennia. It also provides examples of how different cultures categorize concepts like emotions differently in their languages. The document examines how discourse patterns can vary between cultures and how this influenced the legal case of an Aboriginal woman. Finally, it discusses how social class and varieties of language can influence children's performance in school.

1. Linguistic
categories and
culture
Leila Tasbulatova 15500037

2. Outline:
*The cost of language loss
*Discourse patterns and culture
*Language, social class and cognition

4. German:
Das mädchen Das buch
English:

6. Language does not determine what
is perceived, but it is the physical
and socio-cultural environment
which determines the distinctions
that the language develops.

7. Tahitians:
‘sadness’ = ‘sickness’ - an attack by evil
spirits
English:
Depression= feeling blue, in low spirits,
feeling down, under the weather.

8. The cost of language loss
Ubykh language (81 consonants
and more than 20 verb
prefixes):
aqhjazbacr’aghawdætw
aaylafaq’ayt’madaqh–
‘if only you had not been able to
make him take it all out from
under me again for them’

9. Hixkaryana:
Object Verb Subject
“Toto yonoye kamara", cannot be
given the SVO reading "the man
ate the jaguar"; the SVA reading –
"the jaguar ate the man" – is the
only possible one.

10. ‘All around the world local
people transmit, through the
words and expressions of
their language, the fruits of
millennia of close observation
of nature and experimentation
with its products’

11. The Arnhemland
Aboriginal people name
the spangled grunter fish
with the same word as the
native white apple tree
because the fish eats the
fruit as it falls into the
creek or water hole.

12. Tuyuca speakers

13. Discourse patterns and culture
Robyn Kina grew up in difficult family circumstances in an
Aboriginal environment in Australia. By the age of 19, she had a
criminal record as a result of a number of encounters with the police
in which she had come off worst. In her mid-twenties, she lived with a
non-Aboriginal man Tony Black, who regularly beat her up and
subjected her to other horrific attacks, especially when he was drunk.
During an argument one morning, Black threatened to rape Kina’s 14-
year-old niece who was living with them. Kina stabbed him once in
the chest as he came towards her with a chair raised above his head.
She was shocked to see him fall to the ground. He died in hospital
shortly afterwards. Robyn Kina pleaded not guilty to murder since she
had not intended to kill Black. She did not give evidence and no
witnesses were called. After one of the shortest trials in Australian
history, Kina was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment
with hard labour.

14. Aboriginal English:
-you were at the store? - direct question.
-I heard there was a big argument at the store
yesterday - less direct method.
Aboriginal ways of communicating:
- Established a good relationship with Kina over a
period of time,
- shared information about themselves
- used indirect strategies for eliciting her story
- listened patiently and without interruption
- and tolerated long silences.

15. Language, social class
and cognition
Emmie, the daughter of a Scottish aristocratic family, was enrolled at an English ‘public’
(i.e. private fee-paying) boarding school in the south of England. At the end of her first
month, she failed all the oral progress tests. The school assumed she lacked intellectual
ability.
-‘This is outrageous,’ her mother declared, ‘she is an outstandingly intelligent young
woman. What is the problem?’
- ‘Her English is deficient; she can’t communicate,’ responded her form teacher. ‘We can’t
understand a word she says.’
- ‘Well, that’s your problem,’ announced Emmie’s mother. ‘You had better learn to!’
- Middle-class children do well in school. Working-class children don’t do well in school.
- Middle-class children speak a different variety of English than working-class children.
*Usual conclusion: working-class children should change the way they speak.

16. Conclusion
*Language influences our perceptions of ‘reality’.
*Physical and cultural environment in which it develops
influences the vocabulary and grammar of a language.
*The language and discourse patterns may also influence
the way one group interacts with another.