Li Culture And Chinese Language System

With the development of linguistic theory, and drawing on the findings ofsociology and cultural anthropology, linguists are more and more concerned with therelationship between language and culture, especially the relationship between languageand national spirit, and language and national philosophy. They are interested inunderstanding language within the overall matrix of culture, and speech as aninseparable link to social behavior. Any given language is above all a social institution,without which human societies are unimaginable to be organized; whereas the Ii system,among the Chinese culture (essentially a political culture), is a social institutiontraditionally forming our community and formulating its social and political order.Therefore, it is imperative and possible to study the Chinese language and ii culturetogether. We regard the ii culture as the core culture in the present paper, and explore thepeculiarities and convincing features in both structure and use of the language. Inaddition, we try to compare and contrast between the Chinese and the English.This paper is concerned with the Chinese language structure and use from aculfural point of view. Its aim is to show that some of the Chinese languagecharacteristics are culture specific. It consists of four chapters.Chapter One gives an introduction, in which we provide the theoretical backgroundof relations between language and culture by illustrating l-lumboldt's insights and Sapirand Whorfs provoking ideas. Besides, we specify the core culture, and define thedomain of this paper.Chapter Two is concerned with Ii culture and the Chinese language structure. It iscomposed of four sections. The first section copes with the Chinese character, but we44Li Culture and Chinese Language Systemconfine our discussion to the structure in which it resembles the ii spirit of integration,group-orientation and association. The second section is about word order. It is clearthat when there are nouns indicating man and woman, old and young, upper and lower,or inner and outer things inside a word or word group, the former of each group takesprecedence in order, because it indicates the social superior in the hierarchy of the iisystem and should be respected. The third section is a discussion of several uniquephenomena about word building in the Chinese language. Some word centralmorphemes, carrying a strong cultural connotation, are capable of building words, suchas the characters qi(~) and li(-i~L ). More particular, some cultural words are widelyborrowed and appear in other aspects of the culture. The widespread nature of the musicterms and food names is well known. In addition, the particular way of coordinativecompound word building manifests the Chinese mind of the mean. Section four dealswith the inner order of word group as part of a sentence. We compare the Chineseconcept of sequence of importance with that of the English culture.Chapter Three deals with ii culture and the Chinese language use. It consists of foursections. The first section examines family system in China and the respective addressterms and their application principles to generation and sex. Inside the family, the youngare obliged to use respectful addresses and polite language to pay their reverence to theold, so are the women to the men. Since the Chinese society was stably based onpatriarchal system during the long history, we explore the Chinese kinship terms to findout how the awe and respect are manifested in the Chinese language. The secondsection copes with honorifics, or expressions of deference and modesty. Their frequentappearances in the language suggest the importance of social distance and power andauthority. The third section is concerned with communication principles. We make acomparison...