Week 6 Seminar Notes Gp2

Seminar Outline
1. HOUSEKEEPING (17.30-17.40)

- CRITICAL CASE STUDY &amp; PARTICIPATION TASK SHEET

2. INDIVIDUAL RAT (17.40-17.55)

3. TEAM RAT (17.55-18.10)

4. CHALLENGES (18.10-18.15) - ONLY IF REQUIRED

5. LECTURE INPUT (18.15-19.00),

6. ACTIVITY/APPLICATIONS (19.10-19.45)

7. SELF-ASSESSMENT &amp; WORKSHOPPING CASE STUDY (19.45-20.15)

Important Informations, Ideas & Questions
Culture & communication

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

Structure of language shapes not determines the way we experience the world.

- But does language determine culture? Does language restrict us to certain patterns of thinking, expression and interpreting reality?

- Or do cultural needs and priorities (i.e. culture) determine the forms of categorization which exist within a language?

IMPLICATIONS (of interpretations/adaptations) Positive: 

Negative:  Linguistic relativism: 

LANGUAGE TO DISCOURSE

Language - 'systems of representation'

Reflective Approach: meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea or event in the real world and language fuctions like a mirror to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world. (Problem with this approach is that there are many words, sounds and images that we understand fully but does not actually exist in the real world, or at least we cannot see it physically such as angel.)

Intentional Approach: the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. (Problem with this approach is that language can never be wholly a private game. People belong in a culture with certain communication system and everyone in that culture, in one way or another have to fit or go according to their own cultural representational system.)

Constructivist or Constructionist Approach: Things in themselves not the individual users of language can fix meaning to language. Things don't mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems; concepts and signs.

(Hall Stuart 1998, p. 24-25)

Codes: "codes for the relationships between concepts and signs." " [they] establish the translatability between our concepts and our language" (Stuart 1998, p.21)

Structuralism 

Ferdinand de Saussure & Barthes 

Semiotics -

Signs

The 'signifier'

The 'signified'

'Sign systems'

- Roland Barthes

Signs can be denotative (signifier) or connotative (Signified)

Can Connotative can be a metaphor as well?

DISCOURSE & POWER

Post-Structuralism

Derrida, Foucault, later Barthes

Foucault's concept of Discourse

Power/Knowledge

Glossary
Cultural Relativism: the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within his own social context. In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture specific; what is considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another, and, since no universal standard of morality exists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs (see What is Cultural Relativism?).

SAE (Standard Average European)  : a concept introduced by Benjamin Whorf to distinguish Indo-European and Western Indo-European languages from languages of other grammatical types