2014년 10월 24일 금요일

Confirmation of my first draft


1. What is my thesis?
Language has a profound influence on culture even though we have not realized well.

2. What types of source am I using to defend my thesis?
Whorfian theory by Benjamin Whorf, encyclopedia of knowledge (Naver)


3. Are my arguments mostly based on evidence, logic or emotion?
It's hard to find evidences for my argument because of its ambiguity. Due to this, I have to prove my thesis by my logic, refering to Whorfian theory and encyclopedia of language which can explain the process of the influence of language on culture.

 My Confirmation

   Despite the thesis has a difficulty in showing evidences, however, it could be explained by the natural progress and common ideas. First of all, language habits lead to formation and transformation of culture. According to the article which mentions the idea of thesis, culture is defined by the activities of people, sometimes governed by a geographical boundary. People formed their own society and made their own way of life, and this activity is called as cultural formation. After this for a time, culture is learned and also changes as time goes by. This alternation is passed from parents to children also by language.
   Like this, language has had a great role in inheritance because it's hard to inherit cultural formation or alternation without language. Therefore, language habits of the era must have influenced these processes such as that we commonly say we need to have better language habits for better society. It means that language habits would also become as a part of culture.
   This argument is exactly same as the reason why language habits influence cultural formation and alternation. The second reason that human mind and behavior affects society could be explained by this argument too. People express their mind by language and behave following their mind all the time in their society, and usually people in one society resemble this naturally. Language has always been a weapon to express one's ideas and feelings. In other words, human mind and behavior would be expressed by language, which pervades all over the society, and would show the lifestyle of society, so-called culture. In addition, because each person cannot be isolated from society, they would affect each other by their mind and behavior.
   Finally, let's see the third reason that culture usually follows the way of expressing feelings or some things which are helped by language. As you could refer to the first reason and the second reason, culture is formed by the way of expressing feelings (namely, mind). It is easy to know when we just look at ourselves. We always express something by languages, and usually this reflects which culture we have. It is because language is a kind of culture. If people use bad words, their culture becomes to be bad just as the words they say. That's why some argue that people should always be aware of how they say.
   In conclusion, language has a profound effect on culture. According to the idea of The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-fifth Birthday on page 17, my thesis has a scientific name, 'linguistic-cognitive parallelism' or 'linguistic-cultural parallelism.':
This is the claim that there is a close correspondence between linguistic patterns, on the one hand, and cognitive and cultural ones, on the other. Each language reflects the culture of its speech community. In the following this claim will be called parallelism, for short.
   My thesis already has been a classical argument, and can be easily explained by either some papers or our common lifestyles, although there is some conflicts in stating whether language or culture has an influence on another.

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